On 'two years' of weblogs...
Every single time I get asked by someone for my opinion on the whole "weblogs as journalism" thing, I give pretty much the same response. First things first - there are differences. That should be pretty obvious. One clear difference is that working for an established organisation or brand gives you access to the newsgathering machinery. By that I mean from the low-grade, cost-dependent things like being able to afford to get Reuters newsfeeds all the way up to the stuff that's all about being 'in the club' - ie. everything from being invited to movie review screenings before the film is released through to being able to be present in the press room of the White House. These latter things work on the principle that it's not possible to let all the world in to ask all the questions they might like, so there are representatives from the newspapers who ask those questions for them. Fair enough - to an extent that kind of thing is unlikely to be heavily democratised, and quite rightly so.
The other difference between weblogs and established mainstream journalism is in terms of the brand - and more importantly the mechanisms that are supposed to lie behind that brand. The trusted brand is supposed to reflect an organisation that makes sure its journalism conforms to good standards of fact-checking, that it is guaranteed to be professional, that it asks the questions that its readers want answered and that if it is not there is a space and a process whereby redress that can be made. This is what I normally argue when asked - that although there is a lot of overlap between mainstream journalism and weblogs (particularly around opinion pieces, editorials, reviews and ... less fortunately ... regurgitated press releases), there are some things that - for the most part - are done better by the professionals. Webloggery - as yet - cannot even think of competing with the professional newsgatherers.
Well that's what I normally say anyway - despite the fact that absolutely anyone who's ever been featured in a news story (or ever seen a news story about anything they actually know about) knows full well that journalists routinely seem to get quite important and easy-to-check facts wrong. Here's today's example in a piece about (what else) weblogging by Bill Thompson from the BBC: "All over for blogs?". And the typically offending line?
"The earliest bloggers have been at it for two years now - how many days can someone keep on posting to their LiveJournal site, or visiting Blogger to add more details about their cat's mysterious illness? " [my emphasis]
Decent journalists, according to my training, when they put a date or a figure in their work are either supposed to check that figure and mark it as checked, or their sub-editors are supposed to check it for them, grudgingly and with a certain amount of irrtation. I don't know where the gap in professionalism was that allowed this 'two year' figure to go to print, but I do know that it started with the person who wrote the damn article and should have checked in the first place.
The earliest webloggers have been going for two years, then? That should make me positively primordial, since I've been posting regularly since November 1999. Meg Meish in the UK was also posting around then, I believe. Cal Henderson and Matt Webb were both definitely posting regularly over three years ago. There were loads of other people across the UK and the US who started posting around or shortly after that time. And we're all children compared to the long-haul people...
And what's this? If you do a basic Google search for History of Weblogs you get seven articles about the origins of weblogs on the first page? And what do they say? That, "In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of 'other sites like his' as he found them in his travels around the web." [Rebecca Blood] So that's five years for certain - five and a half for certain if we include kottke.org (one of the most linked-to and visited weblogs on the internet). If we look further back, then Dave Winer started Scripting News in April 1997, a few months before the term 'weblog' was invented by John Barger of Robot Wisdom. So now we're nicely over the six year mark - and with what? Thirty seconds worth of research?
So where does that leave us with weblogs vs. journalism? Well I still stand by my word - for the most part proper news gathering is better done by paid professionals with the budgets, access and accountability. There's still space for professionalism. And as soon as I find that professionalism evidencing itself in the opinion section of the BBC News Technology supplement, I'll let you know...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
You know the weird thing about stuff like this is that it's completely routine stuff trotted out by Bill without doing his research properly and it's under the BBC News brand. You'd think that actually checking your facts was probably quite a big deal for them - particularly at the moment when governments keep looking at them funny...
→ Posted by: C. Edward Thomas at August 11, 2003 12:43 AM
Two words for weblog archaeologists: Justin Hall. The links came first, and from the links came the life of a linker. And that's, what, pre-96?
(Or even http://freedonia.com/~carl/ if you're of that mindset, though my gut feeling is that Justin's 'daze' predate Carl's periodic updating.)
God, I was getting pissed with Meg Hourihan in SF *after* she'd left Blogger back in January of 2001, so the 'two years' thing is just utter fuckwittery from Bill T.
→ Posted by: nick sweeney at August 11, 2003 1:16 AM
Op/ed being passed off as fact checked journalism. Who would've thought, eh?
I've been blogging for (counts on fingers) probably nearly four years now - and I don't even own a cat. What's more, some people seem to not bother so much that I don't own a cat and talk about its non-existant mysterious illness. Then again, I also make efforts to correct anything I've written that's blatantly untrue.
"It may be that the same thing is happening to blogs, as more and more sites are created by people with less and less to say."
Well, Bill. You could go and have a look, instead of inaccurately thinking out loud.
Sigh.
→ Posted by: Dan Hon at August 11, 2003 1:19 AM
The marker for this style of journalism is the lazy use of the "cat meme."
→ Posted by: xian at August 11, 2003 3:37 AM
This makes me feel old Tom...
→ Posted by: Rhys Jones at August 11, 2003 9:45 AM
I did a bit of weblog archeology about UK Weblogs some time ago. The
earliest blog I could find was Dan Hon's which started in January 1999. This was followed by Bifurcated Rivets in April 1999. Blogger started in August 1999 so they were both well ahead of the pack who started in late 1999 - early 2000.
I'm interested if there were any other Brit Blogs out there at the time but it would not surprise me if Dan and Lindsay are the longest continuous bloggers in the UK -- 4+ years and counting! :)
→ Posted by: Darren at August 11, 2003 11:52 AM
I replied to him for you (and me because I like cats). As I am gambling that this does not make it through the moderator, here is my half baked reply to yet more Internet snobbery:
"This seems a bit more opinon than fact to me, and very snobby as well as innaccurate. A few things:
1. As pointed out by a few bloggers today, 'blogs' have been around for much longer than two years. Please do more fact checking.
2. Why should people not have a space to write about their cats? This is a cheap and moody jibe. Do we all have to discuss cyber-politics or clever bug fixes? The RSPCA is a hugely popular UK charity and loads of people love animals. Is there something wrong with that?
On hot days, I'd rather discuss cats than have a frustrating rant about an unsatisfactory political system and how technology is only going to serve it's goals with ID cards, GPS and data protection-breaking microchips in clothes and money that mean my privacy dissappears.
3. Do you approach everyone in the pub and meter their conversations? "Sorry, you are wasting airspace with your normal human conversation. Please invoke conversation #3321X, 'The internet and democracy'..."? ..."
→ Posted by: ed at August 11, 2003 5:17 PM
Before Jorn Barger coined the term, before the permalink, before Dave Winer posted his first link on Scripting News, before the Blink tag, before even Netscape 0.9 beta, when a would be web surfer had to knit his own Mosaic browser, the proto-blog existed.
Using a copy of Mosaic, helpfully compiled for me by a colleague (I was a Unix-newbie then), each day, I would faithfully check the "What's New at NCSA" page. I started checking that page in late '94, around September-October as I recall, and it had been going for a year by then, and each day there would be another set of new links, maybe a couple, maybe 30 or more, few enough enough that in a slow morning it was possible to check most of the new web sites created around the world in the previous day. Take a look at the archive, here's September 1994,
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/old-whats-new/whats-new-0994.html
OK, not much in the way of an editorial voice, it's not personal, it was intended to be inclusive after all, and it is the editorial winnowing of links that really makes a blog, but you can't look at that page and tell me that it doesn't look like a blog. It was the sheer eclectic nature which made it so enjoyable then, and is part of what I enjoy about reading blogs now. That was lost for a while, when Yahoo and the other directory sites categorised and consequently channeled our searches, but we have it back now with blogs. Blogs are serendipity on steroids.
→ Posted by: Eddie Cochrane at August 11, 2003 5:36 PM
I think what makes blogs a more interesting read than editorials and the like is that very few bloggers try to pass off what they write as objective. Journalists and news agencies supposedly pride themselves on reporting news impartially and without an agenda but most of us know quite well that this isn't true.
I figure, if I'm going to read about current events, better it be honest and acurate. As it stands a great deal of news today is inacurate, biased and driven by money not news.
As a good friend of mine once said, "I get my news from blogs".
→ Posted by: TheDon at August 11, 2003 5:41 PM
If BillBlog thinks weblogs are boring or inconsequential -- which may or may not be true -- there's a case in claiming the BBC reporting style is the same.
The BBC and Weblogs have a lot in common, the designation of a Beckham correspondent is the intellectual equivalent of reporting about cats. 45 minutes of doom and two years worth of weblogs, timing is everything -- yes, yes, I know, it's a stretch, that's my point. Lets not get slap happy.
I think Bill is suffering from the silly season too, August is such a boring month and the heat is getting a bit too sticky and mean. I'm sure he enjoyed firing off that missive whilst typing naked at his PC, to attract viewers. He's having a good laff and baking in the heat as we reflexively bite back. And, Mosaic with 'what's new,' I've heard this so many times -- the first weblog. It was a sign and wonder and from what I remember the links were submitted in nearly all cases, there weren't that many websites out there and the threshold of publication was very high, hence it was fresh and useful to many of my colleagues, in some academic circles we called it the 'manual'.
→ Posted by: Gummi at August 11, 2003 6:31 PM
Directed towards Dan: I wouldn't argue the point too strongly that it's not true that there's more & more bloggers w/ less & less to say. heh. It seems to me like half the links you follow in any given link's "citation" at daypop or blogdex will take you to a blog that has a link, MAYBE an excerpt, and no personal notation at all. The only way these 'bloggers' could have less to say is if they didn't post at all.
Mind you, I don't care if they post or not - but I wish there was a means by which they could be filtered out of blogdex results. haha.
To TheDon: I'd say that's VERY untrue... I think a LOT of bloggers maybe not so much try to pass themselves off as objective, but really do believe they're objective! Of course, I think it's a case of people not knowing what 'objective' truly means. Not that I'm saying media journalism is 100% objective... But just the fact that my conservative co-worker thinks Fox News is unbiased, and that NPR is biased, and the fact that I'm liberal, and I think Fox News is biased, and NPR is less so... I think that goes to show it depends on your stand point. They're probably both pretty close to unbiased... or at least closer to unbiased than "Tim's Blog" or "Me The Pundit". haha.
→ Posted by: Chloe at August 11, 2003 6:46 PM
Lumping "weblogs" together for the purposes of criticism makes about as much sense as considering all "homepages" as an analysable unit. Which homepage? On what topic? Constructed how? By whom? Blogging has simply become too diverse for the self-satisfied slings and arrows of nervous pundits to hit with a single mark. What is blogging, really? It's a homepage format. To say anything more (like "blogging borders on journalism" or "blogs are little more than simpering diaries") is nonsensical -- akin to critiquing a novel based on the layout of its table-of-contents.
→ Posted by: CheeseburgerBrown at August 11, 2003 7:55 PM
If a member of the public expresses a like for something in a recordable way, then they're saying nothing? Interesting perspective on the electoral system you've just inadvertantly provided!
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at August 11, 2003 7:56 PM
Tom: I assume your comment is directed towards me... If someone just posts a link to a story with nothing else... that's the same as expressing a like for it? Sometimes people post links to stories they're angered by, or hate, or think are lousy... At best, posting a link with nothing else is dubious... I don't know that that's worse than 'nothing'... but YOU are the one that said "and less fortunately... regurgitated press releases..." *I* never said it was unfortunate that people did that, I just said *I* personally didn't have any interest in those blogs. So interesting perspective of your own that you just revealed. heh.
→ Posted by: Chloe at August 11, 2003 8:36 PM
I don't know about the rest of you, but my blog is definitely inconsequential. Does that meam I'm wasting bandwidth? Hey, if you don't like it, don't read it.
I agree with ed; the blogs that I enjoy reading are the 'inconsequential' ones, about feelings, moods, and - ok - cats.
→ Posted by: Simon at August 11, 2003 10:39 PM
I've been hearing that weblogs have been passè for about three years. I personally hold to the theory that Tim Berners-Lee invented the weblog with the web; there just had to be a critical mass of other sites to comment about.
→ Posted by: Graham at August 12, 2003 1:23 AM
Mark 'MT' Twain invented blogs
→ Posted by: nardo at August 12, 2003 3:53 AM
Pah.
Pepys invented the weblog. Just google for it.
→ Posted by: Martin Wisse at August 12, 2003 8:36 AM
life as it happens has been going since 1998, though admittedly as an online journal rather than a weblog. (which makes me old enough, in internet terms, to start collecting my pension - make me a mug of cocoa and fetch my slipper, would you?).
I seem to remember pretty much the same thing being said in the online journalling world a few years ago - that nobody had anything more to say. It was as untrue then as now. It's just not as shiny and new as it seemed a couple of years ago.
→ Posted by: Rodney at August 12, 2003 11:42 PM
I recall making online journals as an off-and-on part of my first Geocities pages back in 1996 (I signed up for a CollegePark address even though I was still a senior in high school, and then had guilt for eight months until I felt legitimate). Started again in 1998 when it seemed like everyone I knew had a daily journal of some sort online. Admittedly, I didn't call anything I did a "blog" until I signed up for Blogger in 2002, but I distinctly felt behind the times in terms of journaling online during that entire period. As to whether blogging is akin to journalism, and whether it's proper to lump all blogs together -- let's not forget how silly it is to lump journalists in with one another. A lady in my father's neighborhood distributes a photocopied page of simpering poetry and recipes and letters about how great her "newsletter" is, sometime between 1 and 6 times a month. She's much closer to the NYT in format terms than she is to a blog. I think it's clear that part of the problem is that when we say "journalism" everyone thinks BBC/NYT/FoxNews/NPR/etc., and when we say "blogging" it means different things to different people. Bill, perhaps, isn't hooked into the InstaPundit circuit, and so doesn't see the blogosphere the same way we do.
→ Posted by: Sarah at August 13, 2003 10:51 AM
Tom, you really should know better than to continue to read Bill Thompson's utter drivel.
→ Posted by: Martin at August 13, 2003 2:00 PM
Recording personal opinions for internet consumption has been around for far longer than 6 years.
Many people I knew had .finger files that performed the same function as a weblog. Mine was started in 1987 and continued through 1992 before I gave it up. And I was not the first by any means.
→ Posted by: Chris at August 13, 2003 11:30 PM
Tom you're disingenuous. Yes the journalist has got a fact wrong, but you're anger comes from somewhere else:
You've taken it as a personal slight that the BBC is saying that blogs aren't cool.
→ Posted by: HarryP at August 14, 2003 9:12 AM
Actually I've taken it as a professional insult to my ex-career of a journalist. The fact that I run a weblog is how I know he's wrong, it's not my reason for being angry with him. And I think I should make clear that this is nothing to do with the BBC either - since I've been working there for the last few months and I know full well what the institutions angle on weblogs is.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at August 14, 2003 7:11 PM
[Been away, just back and stumbled across your comments on my holiday piece. Shame you didn't drop me an email to let me know it was there or I'd have been here earlier.]
Tom - so I got a fact wrong and nobody corrected it. Sad but there it is - I'm sorry. I was writing at the end of a 10k GSM dialup line, and messed up. It happens.
But I'm afraid that I do think there is something more going on here than you criticising me as a sloppy journalist, some deeper defensiveness about the nature of blogging and what use it all is.
The fact is, I don't take blogging very seriously as a major new media phenomenon, and I think that those of you who do are wrong. I doubt we will ever agree. But it won't stop me using blog technology if it suits my purposes :-)
I am first and foremost a journalist. An imperfect one (which of us isn't) but I have an editor and a set of professional responsibilities. That, I believe, makes a difference. Using blogging technology to give people a voice is fine, but don't confuse it with what is happening in online journalism.
And it worries me that the BBC may be listening to the zealots again when it comes to blogging, just as they did with so many other here today gone tomorrow net technologies - remember channels? remember push technology?
→ Posted by: Bill Thompson at September 7, 2003 6:58 PM