Recently I spoke about blogging at my son’s journalism class, and we talked about a lot of aspects of how journalists’ lives have changed due to the Internet. I talked about how my blogging is probably the equivalent of the ‘zines that used to pass between people who shared similar interest. When I was in my 20’s, for example, I read zines about music. They were little photocopied pamphlets that a person would make and sell to others with similar interests. The likelihood that a zine would reach even 1000 people was very small—back then, it was so hard to find people with similar interests because you were confined to the physical world.
These days, every blog is like a zine but with some obvious differences: for one, it’s free, and more importantly, you can reach so many more people. Blogs range from those with no readers (save the writer) to those with millions of readers. The effort that the bloggers put forth ranges from occasional musings to the equivalent of a full-time job. And the rewards of a blog range from a charming pastime to, in a few cases, a decent income.
What blogs don’t have, what has largely been dumped from the process altogether, are editors. Blogs are a journalistic free-for-all—taken as seriously by many people as serious news websites, they are not held to any journalistic standard at all. This gives bloggers incredible freedom, but also means that bloggers don’t benefit from the intellectual back-and-forth that characterizes a good writer-editor relationship.
Do I think this is a bad thing? Well, on the one hand, yes, we all suffer from the loss of editorial control. Writers suffer because editors force us to be better writers and to think more deeply about what we’re writing about. Readers suffer because we are presented with such a range of content that it’s hard to discern what has been written thoughtfully and with attention to facts and what has been dashed off by someone in a steam. Media outlets suffer because they think that they’re gaining—cool, we don’t have to pay those pesky editors anymore!—but actually they’re losing quality, credibility, and the maturity of writers who have someone to answer to.
Back in the day of ‘zines, the zine writers didn’t have to answer to anyone, and that made them exciting. It was so fun to read someone’s uncensored opinion. At the same time that I might pick up Spin Magazine from a newsstand, I’d read some photocopied zine with a person’s bold thoughts in it. Spin would have access to all the stars and all the opinion makers, but the zine would be much more fun.
Blogs have blown the world of journalism wide open. The world has changed and will never be as it was. Is this a good thing? Sure. Are there things I think we’ve lost? Most definitely. I hope that as the Internet matures, we all learn to find both the fun and excitement of uncensored opinions and also the challenge and importance of well-reasoned, well-edited journalism. Right now, I fear that such journalism is just going to go away, but I hope that things will shift as we all become more savvy consumers of online media.
How the world has changed
A girl dying of leukemia made a request to hear holiday caroling outside of her home. 6000 people turned up. Would this have happened in the days before social media? Certainly, spontaneous, large gestures did happen, but behind the seeming spontaneity was a group of hard-working people who had to physically round up the participants. Social media, blogs, and the immediacy of the Internet has changed the landscape of our lives.
