For the first several years of my adult life I made a living by asking questions to strangers that I wouldn't feel comfortable asking of my own friends. I then wrote about what they said while knowing that I was merely doing the best I could to impart a telling detail from an artificial relationship I'd constructed through the course of an interview that was often adversarial and always semi-real. Now I've traded in deadwood journalism for blogging, initially because the publication I was working for imploded, but as a consolation prize I knew where the industry was going and wanted to try opinion-based writing. I mean, if Richard Cohen can do it...
Anyway, to the right is a grim visual from The Awl of what has happened to newspaper circulation the past couple of decades and the coinciding cliff-dive that seems to have happened as blogs took off. Someone pass the Dramamine.
The problems with journalism being unable to monetize the Internet are well documented. But the reason for blogs cutting into journalism's readership are much less defined. I suspect it has less to do with like-minded people congregating around a virtual water cooler (though that's certainly part of it) and more to do with a story being augmented by what's perceived to be an informed take. I read what I consider to be smart blogs to help pick out a detail in a story that otherwise I might have glossed over.
Anyone who is friends with a journalist knows that person is in a thankless, back-breaking profession that demands constant dedication without much returned in the way of pay. It's a labor of love, as they say. To be good at your job--and I'm certain this is true with any profession--you have to posses an almost obsessive focus. It's the people who don't want to sacrifice time for kids or hobbies who get ahead at work--and that became especially true when journalism tried earlier this decade to offer enough material for the Web and the dead tree edition. The amount of work doubled, while pay remained the say. A weeding out process followed, with the newspaper industry getting leaner and meaner. Much meaner when it came to reporters being forced to hit the unemployment line.
That gets me to the similarities between journalism and blogs, which are too often painted as competing interests but really are complimentary parts. (Side note: I find the criticism that blogs couldn't exist without journalism to be totally bizarre. Um, right, that's the point.) I have more of an allegiance to a provocative, insightful idea relayed through the written word than I do to "journalism" or "blogging." Ta-Nehisi Coates can take it from there:
Incredible journalism is like incredible baby-making--it starts
with passion. The guy combing through the city budgets because it's his
job, isn't the same as the guy combing through them because it keeps
him up at night, because he thinks about it when he shouldn't be.
Institutions support that passion--but they don't create it. When my
old Howard buddy was killed by the cops, it was all I could think
about, and it was all I wanted to write about. And I did it almost for
free, because it helped me sleep at night. I was burning to get it
down. I deeply suspect that the bloggers you love, and the reporters
you love, are similarly on fire inside.
The problem at the moment is that blogs are pointing out all of journalism's considerable flaws while the industry adjusts to the Internet Age. Eventually journalism is going to figure out how to make money again. Some of that will of course be sensationalist, Politico-brand. Its always been around. But I suspect that what comes out of the certain death of old-school, unaccountable journalism will be a much smarter form of journalism whipped into shape by the rise of informed bloggers who are watching the watchers and demanding more of them.