OK, I said I wasn’t going to do this, but it’s too good to resist...
Dave Winer points to a sparkling newborn blog, set up by Fortune techcolumnist Peter Lewis and actually being hosted at the main Fortune.com site.
Bravo, Fortune, for demonstrating what appears to be genuinely clueful behaviour.
What I really like about this “old media” incursion into the blogverse is that it could so easily have taken a totally different tone and direction. It would have been way too easy (and just horribly disappointing) for Fortune to fall in with the obvious kneejerk – spill lots of ink/pixels over the big hairy questions du jour: “is blogging journalism?” “are blogs the new new media?”.
Looks like someone at Fortune’s smart enough to have realized that these questions are, frankly, valueless. It really doesn’t matter whether you consider weblogs to be a “real” form of media or not. In effect, the question (as much as it was ever remotely pertinent) has already been answered anyway.
Blogito ergo sum.
As soon as the first person read the first blog posting, the medium existed as a real medium. It is what it is.
John Ellis in Fast Company was heading in the right direction with his oft-cited “All the News That’s Fit to Blog” piece:
“Major news organizations breathed a huge sigh of relief when dotcom mania came crashing down. That meant that the barriers to entry in their markets were reerected and that their (mostly) monopoly positions were resecured. Now the bloggers are at the gates, eating into the media's value-added proposition. It's no small threat, because the peer-to-peer technology that underlies it is what the military calls a "force multiplier.”
But this still assumes an OR logic to the whole thing which seems just plain wrong.
It’s not that blogs will kill print - that’s unsupportable alarmist sillybuggery. No disrespect to John at all - I think his conclusion was drawn for dramatic effect. But I don't think even he really believes that blogs will entirely cancel out old media. That’s in the same league as thinking that radio would kill print (or video killed the radio star, for that matter).
Blogging is just a game changer. I know it’s really not as simple as this, but I want to say something like: weblogs are to print media as TV is to radio. Just as the Web has already done, blogging spurs print publications to change their preconceptions, methods and means. It's about agility. Blogs send a wake up call, forcing both old and new ways of working to rapidly adapt. But it doesn't have to be “adapt or die.” Just adapt. Adapt and grow stronger, hopefully - at least adapt.
And yes – this counts equally for both worlds. As there's room for both, so too must both continue to change.
Blogs have had to rapidly evolve and adapt to get this far. Incidentally, much of the adaptation seems to have been unconsciously driven by observing how print journalism works and finding a relevant synthesis for online purposes. Blogging will continue to thrive and survive as a form of journalism as the number of strong, independent voices (and, incidentally, the number of established inkblot journalists and commentators) participating in the medium continues to increase.
Print journalism must also adapt, but it will continue to thrive and survive by being so very good at what it has always done – responding to the changing needs of a changing world.
I enjoy reading the WSJ, the Guardian and other “print” pubs on my Palm every day - easier to manage on the crowded subway. But I will still reach for the ink and paper versions of the same whenever I can. Similarly, I love the online versions of both Canada's national daily newspapers, but wouldn’t cancel my doorstep subscription copies for anything. Can’t see this changing any time soon.
So. Back to the point: the encouraging thing about Peter’s blog, is that he avoids getting into the “what’s all this blogging stuff anyway” commentary, and instead just leaps in with a clear and natural human voice commenting on things that matter to him.
It's not another pundit sounding off on "the blogging phenom", it's a real writer using the emerging means to his own ends.
One of his first posts is a sizzling rant about what he describes as the “reeking piece of legislative pork rind” that is the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act of 2002.
It’s a good piece. You should go and read it. Really. It's a lot more interesting than the rest of what I have to say below. Go on. I don't mind. Off you go.
Full marks to Fortune for having the courage of their convictions. Sure, they probably got suitably lawyered up before letting Peter step up on the blog soapbox, but it’s still a worthy and clueful thing to be doing. A much healthier and more rational response to the blogging opportunity than that taken by certain well-respected tech columnists (beautifully satirized by Kevin Marks masquerading as John C. Mahler).
Tangential interruption: is a blog post that comments on the nature and practice of blogging a “metablog”, i.e. a blog about blogging?
Or, as so many blog posts are essentially a form of “meta” behaviour anyway (very often pointing to links and examples of whatever it is they’re commenting about), is blogging about the act of blogging actually a meta-meta-blog.
Whatever. I just know I never met a blog I didn’t like....
Dave Winer points to a sparkling newborn blog, set up by Fortune techcolumnist Peter Lewis and actually being hosted at the main Fortune.com site.
Bravo, Fortune, for demonstrating what appears to be genuinely clueful behaviour.
What I really like about this “old media” incursion into the blogverse is that it could so easily have taken a totally different tone and direction. It would have been way too easy (and just horribly disappointing) for Fortune to fall in with the obvious kneejerk – spill lots of ink/pixels over the big hairy questions du jour: “is blogging journalism?” “are blogs the new new media?”.
Looks like someone at Fortune’s smart enough to have realized that these questions are, frankly, valueless. It really doesn’t matter whether you consider weblogs to be a “real” form of media or not. In effect, the question (as much as it was ever remotely pertinent) has already been answered anyway.
Blogito ergo sum.
As soon as the first person read the first blog posting, the medium existed as a real medium. It is what it is.
John Ellis in Fast Company was heading in the right direction with his oft-cited “All the News That’s Fit to Blog” piece:
“Major news organizations breathed a huge sigh of relief when dotcom mania came crashing down. That meant that the barriers to entry in their markets were reerected and that their (mostly) monopoly positions were resecured. Now the bloggers are at the gates, eating into the media's value-added proposition. It's no small threat, because the peer-to-peer technology that underlies it is what the military calls a "force multiplier.”
But this still assumes an OR logic to the whole thing which seems just plain wrong.
It’s not that blogs will kill print - that’s unsupportable alarmist sillybuggery. No disrespect to John at all - I think his conclusion was drawn for dramatic effect. But I don't think even he really believes that blogs will entirely cancel out old media. That’s in the same league as thinking that radio would kill print (or video killed the radio star, for that matter).
Blogging is just a game changer. I know it’s really not as simple as this, but I want to say something like: weblogs are to print media as TV is to radio. Just as the Web has already done, blogging spurs print publications to change their preconceptions, methods and means. It's about agility. Blogs send a wake up call, forcing both old and new ways of working to rapidly adapt. But it doesn't have to be “adapt or die.” Just adapt. Adapt and grow stronger, hopefully - at least adapt.
And yes – this counts equally for both worlds. As there's room for both, so too must both continue to change.
Blogs have had to rapidly evolve and adapt to get this far. Incidentally, much of the adaptation seems to have been unconsciously driven by observing how print journalism works and finding a relevant synthesis for online purposes. Blogging will continue to thrive and survive as a form of journalism as the number of strong, independent voices (and, incidentally, the number of established inkblot journalists and commentators) participating in the medium continues to increase.
Print journalism must also adapt, but it will continue to thrive and survive by being so very good at what it has always done – responding to the changing needs of a changing world.
I enjoy reading the WSJ, the Guardian and other “print” pubs on my Palm every day - easier to manage on the crowded subway. But I will still reach for the ink and paper versions of the same whenever I can. Similarly, I love the online versions of both Canada's national daily newspapers, but wouldn’t cancel my doorstep subscription copies for anything. Can’t see this changing any time soon.
So. Back to the point: the encouraging thing about Peter’s blog, is that he avoids getting into the “what’s all this blogging stuff anyway” commentary, and instead just leaps in with a clear and natural human voice commenting on things that matter to him.
It's not another pundit sounding off on "the blogging phenom", it's a real writer using the emerging means to his own ends.
One of his first posts is a sizzling rant about what he describes as the “reeking piece of legislative pork rind” that is the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act of 2002.
It’s a good piece. You should go and read it. Really. It's a lot more interesting than the rest of what I have to say below. Go on. I don't mind. Off you go.
Full marks to Fortune for having the courage of their convictions. Sure, they probably got suitably lawyered up before letting Peter step up on the blog soapbox, but it’s still a worthy and clueful thing to be doing. A much healthier and more rational response to the blogging opportunity than that taken by certain well-respected tech columnists (beautifully satirized by Kevin Marks masquerading as John C. Mahler).
Tangential interruption: is a blog post that comments on the nature and practice of blogging a “metablog”, i.e. a blog about blogging?
Or, as so many blog posts are essentially a form of “meta” behaviour anyway (very often pointing to links and examples of whatever it is they’re commenting about), is blogging about the act of blogging actually a meta-meta-blog.
Whatever. I just know I never met a blog I didn’t like....
