What amuses me most about Nick Coleman’s essay on blogging is that while he derides bloggers as “hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world,” he writes just like one of those angry startup bloggers. Kudos.
I don’t even know who this guy is - I don’t really care. In essence, that’s the nature of blogging; why it works and what it is. I attribute credibility to those who demonstrate they deserve it from me, something that know-nothing Nick Coleman doesn’t manage.
On my blog you will find my feelings about any number of topics, political and personal. These are my opinions, however ill-informed. Nobody ever said that blogs are supposed to be pillars of news-reporting virtue. But the fact of the matter is that I know more about some topics than Coleman ever will, and you would ignore my authoritative voice on these topics at your own peril.
This is where any journalist who says that blogging isn’t as good as “journalism” has got it wrong. It’s not a journalist’s job to be unbiased and unimpeachable. Who wants news told from a bland impartial angle, anyway? It is a job of a journalist to report on events that people can’t attend themselves.
Not everyone can attend every Philly’s game. So we have a reporter - a journalist - sit at the game and record the event, then give his impression of it later in a medium that is both convenient for him to broadcast and for us to receive. It just happens that blogging is a highly specialized form of journalism.
Now, instead of waiting for CNN to broadcast a blip of a news story about a local little league team, I can find the blog of the coach or a player and read first hand info about what’s going on. This metaphor applies directly to political blogging, where no journalist can claim he knows better than any blogger with a political opinion.
Moreover, since there are so many blogs on the popular topics, readers are free to choose with what quirky bias they like their information served. This is similar to choosing one of the network news sources depending on your political leaning, but more granular and usually more to your topical preferences. Plus, you’re always free to browse the opposing viewpoint, which is difficult with traditional media, since those opposing viewpoints are often aired at the same time or in a publication not easily obtained in your area.
I’m certainly not going to purport that blogs will replace mainstream media as news outlets, nor am I going to say that the networks had better watch their backs just because on this one occasion a group of bloggers proved some network anchor wrong. But this one incident does prove that blogging has a place in news; one that isn’t relegated to “those foolish bloggers”.
There is one harsh fact that big media needs to face, though - the guys doing the A-list blogging are individually a lot smarter than they are, and collectively make the networks look amateurish, like gradeschool bullies who tried to rough up the quiet kid who knew Tae-Kwon-Do. Now they’re all complaining because they had their butts kicked.
Nick Coleman doesn’t get it, and that’s as it should be. He will be hard pressed to ever become an expert at why blogs work and are important, and as such will never offer an authoritative report on the topic. There are plenty of other people who know better, and deserve my attribution of credibility.
