Back in the day, blogs were, I think, more lists of links than serious writings. They were a sharing of cool stuff we found while surfing. Not that there wasn’t a little narrative bubble-wrap. There always was. I think. But it was more about links really.
Oh, and diaries. There was a lot of blogging that was diaristic. Today I had fries with my burger and a straw in my milk.
And the ‘zinesters found the form and gradually what had been distributed on mail lists or produced in HTML found its way into a last-things-first blog format and THE WRITERS HAD ARRIVED.
Many journalists are writers. Not all of them are hacks. Or shills. And the number of journalists who found their way onto the web now that the user interface matched their technical skill level was huge. And they brought their fetishes regarding "professionalism" with them. And their angst.
Writing, I gather, is a skill that journalists use to "do journalism." It’s not really an intentional activity. Journalists appear to be more interested in "nailing it" than "phrasing it." You wouldn’t see them line up three post headings about an electric outage, a new blog they found, and a link to Riverbend just to tie some imagery together. Just because they could… because it would have a formal feeling of dots-nize.
It’s natural for a professional witness to feel angst. Imagine what Heisenberg would have felt like if he was requied to submerge himself in the bubble chamber before those particle physics experiments could begin. Journalists have made every attempt not to BE the story, but rather to report it. This is rather not so among the rabble who blog. We feel we have a right to raise our voices when we write, to loose the restrictions of strict "objectivity," to work with the blessing of Saint Heisenberg, and the excuse his physics experiments brought those of us needing a rationalization for our point of view, our subjectivity.
This morning I read Ronni Bennett regarding lawsuits for age discrimination, and I read the first person but unattributed post by (I think) Lisa Stone describing the BlogHer panel "Suffragette Journalists - Oped pages of our own", featuring Anastasia Goodstein, Chris Nolan and Evelyn Rodriguez.
Also, this month’s CJR has a short article urging Main Stream Media to fight back. I rather liked it.
(Incidentally, the CJR link is a teaser. The dead trees article is richer, deeper, longer lasting, more flavorful, no bitter aftertaste, and it will make your car run smoother and the girls will like you and the bullies won’t kick sand at you on the beach).
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