There’s been noise
this week about the rivalry between competing blogs as well as the rivalry
between blogs and the mainstream media. I found myself reflecting on all of this
from the perspective of someone who has worked in both places, who has a great
love of online reporting but also deeply appreciates the in-depth work that can
be the hallmark of some mainstream publications. Personally, I don’t see
rivalry. I see complementary efforts that help each other and readers. But I do
worry that some of the classic journalism that I learned, that I love to read,
might get lost as the mediaspace continues to change.
To get into my thoughts, I have to share some of my background and personal
interests. I hope readers will keep with me as I make these detours along the
way.
I’m a voracious reader, and newspapers were one of my first great reading
loves. I think it started when I had to do current event reports way back in
fifth grade, and I’ve been reading them ever since. When deciding about college,
I also had to decide on a career — and I settled on newspaper reporting.
Suddenly reading the paper wasn’t just entertainment. It was required homework
to land one of those all-important internships.
I chose the wrong college to become a journalist.
UC Irvine has no journalism department. Of
course while I say it was the wrong choice, that’s not correct. It just put me
down a non-traditional path. Had I made the "right" choice, I might not be doing
the online reporting about search that I love today.
Without a journalism department, those of us at the campus newspaper,
The New University, taught
ourselves. We read everything we could find about journalism. We went to
journalism conferences. And the really serious ones among us took the two (count
‘em two) non-fiction writing classes that the college offered. These were taught
by Joseph N. Bell –
Joe Bell, as we called him.
I’d describe Joe as a grizzled old magazine writing veteran, and that
description is meant with a great deal of respect and affection. Joe had been
around. He’d written all types of non-fiction and often joked about having
written in the last edition of several great magazines. I learned from him how
to better interview plus the great art of crafting a feature story.
Well, feature stories can be a great art when done right. I can’t say I
personally was a great artist with them. It’s been years since I’ve done a
feature story in the way that I was taught, working with multiple sources,
taking great care with quotes, really crafting a tale that sings out. That was
more back in my print journalism days, and I never really got as far along that
track as I thought I would or expected to.
Instead, the internet came along. I found myself as a newspaper reporter at
the end of 1994 looking at the internet and not wanting to miss out on the
publishing revolution that I and others could so clearly see coming. I couldn’t
wait until the newspapers decided if it was going to be AOL or Prodigy or
CompuServe or something they created that was going to be their future. The web
was the future, and I jumped ship in early 1995.
My time as a web developer was brief. I’d joined a friend’s company, and
neither of us really knew how to price web sites that were a hard sell (at least
for us) back then. By mid-1996, he focused on software development. I went on my
own as a consultant as well as maintaining some pages I’d started that covered
the search engine industry. I also started picking up freelance magazine writing
assignments.
Those assignments were a lot of work for not really that much money. Lots of
interviews to dig into a subject, lots of long-distance calling and lots of
effort to start building up relationships with a variety of magazines if I
wanted to continue on that path. Instead, I decided in early 1997 to focus on my
web site, those pages about search engines, the ones
that later became Search
Engine Watch.
If we’d had blogs back then, that’s what those pages would have been — a
blog about search engines. But we didn’t have blogs. We didn’t have the
attention that gets focused today on blog publishing giants like
TechCrunch,
Read/Write Web,
paidContent.org,
VentureBeat or
GigaOM. We just called them web sites. There
were relatively few of us doing online journalism through them, but we were out
there.
For this reason, I have a little chuckle sometimes when I read about the "new
wave" that’s happening now. I’m sure someone like
Andy Bourland must
have a similar chuckle. He started ClickZ back in 1998 or 1999 and later sold it
to Jupitermedia for about $16 million. ClickZ wasn’t a blog, but it was an
online publication charting new waters and finding its own audience just as much
as some of the current blogs I’ve named.
The revolution to me, I guess, is that it seems easier than ever for people
– individuals even — to self-publish. Certainly online publications seem to be
getting more attention and recognition than ever. By and large, I think that’s a
great thing. As a writer, I’ve never looked back and wished I was back with a
mainstream publication. I’ve felt in control of my own destiny and have been
happy to chart my own waters, to be building something new and valuable.
But make no mistake. I know I’m not doing the classic journalism that I
thought I would be doing. I’ll personally go into depth to help explain a
particular story, and I’ll bring my experience to provide an analysis that I
hope is helpful to others. But I’m not doing deep, multi-person interviews. I’m
not spending days or weeks on a story. And neither are most of the online
publications that I read.
This really has been on my mind since yesterday, because I had the great
pleasure of being interviewed by New Yorker writer
Ken Auletta for a book he’s working on.
It will be his 11th. I was fascinated about the process. Bookstores and
libraries are like hallowed places to me, such is the respect I have for books
and the authors who’ve invested so much time and talent to create them. I hope
someday to find the time, energy and skill to do my own book on something. But
the process especially for a non-fiction book seems so daunting. Ken indulged me
to talk a bit about it, and I hope he won’t mind me sharing a bit here. How many
interviews will he do? Hundreds. How long will he take? Maybe years.
We also talked a bit about the process of doing a magazine article. He talked
of spending weeks or months on a project. I found myself getting oddly
emotional. You see, it’s been so long since I’ve even thought of spending that
much time on a piece — and suddenly, part of me wanted to get back to it.
Moreover, I’ve read so many quality pieces of journalism that I know have taken
that long to compile, appreciated having read them but found myself worried that
they’ll die off. Who’s going to fund writers producing these? Did Ken, a veteran
of writing such articles, worry they’d disappear?
Yes, he did. He was encouraged that some publications that produce such work
are seeing circulation rises, The New Yorker,
The Economist and the
Atlantic Monthly being some examples I
recall him giving. But he was also concerned that maybe the appetite for such
work won’t be maintained, especially among younger readers.
I certainly hope it will, and this leads me back to that rivalry between the
mainstream media and blogs that I mentioned earlier. In Michael Arrington’s
self-described
rant, he talks of taking apart CNET and the politics between bloggers and
the mainstream media. Me, I didn’t realize we as bloggers/online publishers/the
non-mainstream media had politics between the mainstream media or that we were
at war with them.
Perhaps I’ve been in my own protective little bubble. Of course, I’ve had
irritation with the mainstream media. I’ve watched the Daily Telegraph twice
lift quotes or factual information from my own stories without attribution,
something I stopped short of doing a rant about (I might come back to it the
next time the Daily Telegraph’s editor
starts
yapping again about Google as a content thief. Don’t get me going about how
the DT thinks it can just help itself to Facebook photographs, either). I’ve
read mainstream media articles about search that I’ve found stunningly
inaccurate, which in turn make me wonder why I trust anything else I read by
them. I’ve seen them come late to stories, and I’ve
long-since given up hope
they’ll link to publications in the way that blogs commonly link to them.
Still, I’ve also commonly seen the mainstream media as the place doing that
type of journalism I don’t find on blogs, those deep multi-source digs into a
particular topic. For example:
-
Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem): This was a
fascinating piece done by New York Times magazine author Clive Thompson,
digging into how Google was dealing with Chinese censorship demands. I learned
tons, and it is simply not the type of piece I would ever see myself producing
in the way I write now.
-
The Search Party by the aforementioned Ken Auletta went into depth about
how forces might ally against Google to stem its advance in seemingly all
directions.
- Journey to
the (Revolutionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, and Possibly Self-Destructive)
Center of Google from GQ was a fascinating account of Google’s IPO, filled
with color.
These pieces are complementary to what I do. They help me do a better job
with my flavor of reporting and analysis, my niche that the mainstream media
doesn’t do. For me, I’m cheering these writers and often speaking with some of
them on the phone for stories not in hopes of getting a quote (sure, it’s nice)
but because I want to help, want to contribute and want to learn from the
ultimate story that comes out.
I’m not saying that blogs can’t do this type of work. Indeed, I’m probably
overlooking places like Salon and elsewhere
that it’s already happening at. As a writer, I’ve been shamefully, woefully far
too restricted in what I’ve been reading over the past few years. That’s
starting to change as I find myself falling in love again with writing, the
writing process and reading good writing of all types.
Yes, blogs can do this work, this type of heavy investigative lifting. But to
date, I wouldn’t say that’s a key role they’ve fulfilled. My main point is that
they do the opposite — they provide the commentary, analysis and perspective
that the mainstream media often misses — not to mention they can break news
faster, as well.
In Mike’s rant, he also got a lot into the idea that there’s a lot of linking
politics between blogs, that the blogosphere is "a frontier town with no
lawman." Maybe in his world. In my search world, not so.
If Philipp over at Google Blogoscoped
has a nice look at some topic about Google, more power to him. I’ll happily
point at him and figure that’s one less topics I need to dive deep on. The same
is true if John Battelle has something,
Search Engine Guide does,
SEOmoz does,
Marketing Pilgrim does,
Search Engine Journal does,
Online Marketing Blog does or even the
publication I compete with the most,
Search Engine Watch. Naturally,
I want Search Engine Land — my own
publication — to have the best content, the greatest stories and the hottest
scoops. But no one publication does it all, and at least within the search
blogosphere, I think the various publications have all had excellent relations
linking to each other and crediting each other. I think to some degree we all
understand that we can complement each other even if we also compete.
I’ll end with two articles from writers I respect and who have come from the
mainstream media:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog: Goodbye Dead Trees!
is from Kara Swisher earlier this year. I loved this part:
First, after almost eight months of daily blogging for this site, I think
it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing
professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my
career-such that it will be-publishing online only.
Sing it sister, or more perhaps more appropriately, welcome to the choir. I
went through this back in 1997, and it’s been nice to see more and more of the
journalists from the mainstream space jump into online. Honestly, the more the
merrier.
What I’ve Learned as a Blogger for The New York Times is from Saul Hansell
of the New York Times, another writer I greatly respect and who I also saw
yesterday after talking with Ken. We also talked a bit about how blogs and the
mainstream media are intersecting and the positives that are emerging because of
that. I especially liked in his piece how he’s been finding that blogs indeed
can be part of a conversation or extend traditional stories in other ways.
To conclude, I don’t feel we have to have blog-on-blog violence, much less
blog-on-mainstream media violence. Yes, we can all get along, and I think we
make ourselves stronger in our diversity and in understanding that collectively,
we make a better whole.
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }