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| Friday, October 3, 2003 |
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Roll away 
| | One conversation, repeated several times with different combinations of bloggers, comes down to this: old blogrolls have become a pain in the ass. All of us who have been blogging for awhile have lots of dead links in our 'rolls, and frankly don't even look at the things very much. Did once, maybe, but not any more. |
| | So our 'rolls are legacies. We maintain them for readers more than ourselves. Interesting, no? |
UCannt
How about blog-based print journals?
| | We're spending a lot of time — way too much, perhaps — on questions about how existing journals accept blogging and put it to good use. That's the subject visited by the post below, and it's fine as far as it goes. |
| | But how about turning that question inside out? How about creating new print journals that are based on blogging? That's my question for this weekend at BloggerCon. |
| | With more than a million active blogs already in the world, I think it's safe to suggest that blogs are the base life form in the new journalistic ecosystem. Older established life forms — newspapers, magazines, TV and radio news organizations — won't go away, but they'll adapt. That's what I was talking about below. Other new life forms, however, will emerge. And one will be the blog-based print journal. |
| | I'm predicting that within a year there will be print journals that start on the Web, harness blog energy, put the blog posting, vetting & editing process to work, distill it, and run it through to publication with ink on paper. I'm also predicting that it will take off, for the simple reason that itwill be far less expensive and far more efficient than the magazine publishing system we have today, which unavoidably regards Web sites, and the Web in general, as a pain in the ass. |
| | In fact.... well, stay tuned. |
Reconstructive journalism
| | A little fact is a dangerous thing is Scott Rosenberg's BloggerCon essay on the trust-in-progress qualities of the notes-in-progress nature of blogging, and how lots of people get stuff wrong — and worse, believe it, without question. And then perpetuate, propogate, repropgate, permute, disseminate and otherwise cause it to spread and change, whether by ink or pixels. He concludes: |
| | My point is that facts in political debate are always at the service of perspective. "Facts all come with points of view," as David Byrne sang 20 years ago. Facts are not the endpoint but rather the starting point for a political argument. But too often -- among bloggers like everywhere else -- we use them as a way to close off debate. "You're wrong," we say; or, worse, "you're lying." |
| | We like to cordon off "fact" from "opinion" in our brains, but there is no bright sharp line between them. A fact can mislead depending on what other facts it is or is not juxtaposed with. (Jay Rosen has a good piece about this in relation to the hoary question of whether blogs are reporting or opinion.) Opinions need facts to give them persuasive heft, but facts need opinions to give them meaning. We all have lots of both. It's how we integrate them that counts. |
| | One way of defining honesty is this: Honesty is the quality of accepting new facts even when they run against your opinions. And that quality is what earns trust -- whether you're a professional journalist, a blogger, or any combination thereof. |
| | The New York Times is a newspaper. It has a daily pulse and a public behavior that's expressed by ink on paper delivered to doorsteps, newsstands and hotel restaurants (where I read it this morning). It's a New York paper, with a New York perspective. Also a West 43rd Street perspective. |
| | A digression here. One of my theses that didn't make it into Cluetrain, because my co-authors correctly considered it off-topic, was this: You are where you come from. The second person singular I'm using here — the you — refers to the organizational as well as the personal personality. It's what I was talking about when I wrote the email to Dave that became Doc Searls on Steve Jobs. Apple always came from the Steves, but Jobs especially. It'll still be his company, even (should the company survive) after he's dead and his portrait is hanging in the lobby of the company headquarters. |
| | Lee Scott, the CEO of Wal-Mart, after hearing me talk about how companies have souls, told me "I truly believe companies have souls," and went on to say old dead Sam Walton was still, in fact, running the company; that it was still, deep down, a five & dime from Bentonville, Arkansas. And how, because Wal-Mart carries Sam's DNA, there are plenty of questions that come pre-answered about the company, and others nobody would ever bother to ask, because they know what Sam's answer would be. (I've written about this before, here.) |
| | Same goes for the New York Times. It's not a blog. It never will be a blog. The best it can ever hope to do, blog-wise, is respect and take advantage of what blogging has to offer — for its writers, for its readers, for its news sources, for its city and its culture. That's it. |
| | Meanwhile, let's twist this thing around now. For that, go to the post above. |
Hearing voices
| | Editing is not the same as filtering, which is what publishers do. Publishers decide what they are going to put in print, distribute and market. They may accept all manner of writing as long as it finds an audience, and that is what we describe as the "voice" of the publication. In that sense, a blog can have a voice. The voice can be coherent or uneven or incoherent. But a great deal of editing goes into the establishment and preservation of that voice; when we talk about a "New Yorker story" or a "Lad magazine story" or a "Cosmo story" we have a good idea of what that means because the editors of the publications are working to select stories that fit into the voice of the publication. They may sometimes stretch the voice with a piece that is more or less daring (think of the way Esquire has morphed ceaselessly for the last 15 years, since it first went downhill), but basically the content of the magazine is carefully filtered to deliver what readers have come to expect from the publication--marketing told them to expect it or tradition has led them to expect. |
Blog of the Day
| | One of the reasons we left Marin, beautiful as it is, is that it was incredibly expensive to live there, especially on one salary. |
| | An interesting and sane daily perspective. |
| | Property taxes are quite low here, so there's rarely a need to sell land to pay the property taxes as there can be in the States, and therefore land tends to stay in the family rather than being sold at inter-generational milestones. Around the corner from us is a family whose daughter is in Nathaniel's class at school, which has four generations living on the farm. Her great-grandmother runs the local vegetable stand, rain or shine, out of an old trailer. Onions, potatoes, tomatoes, calabrese (broccoli to you Yanks), winter melons, and cauliflower. All well priced, and all from local farmers somewhere between her stand and the next town of Rock. |
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