Again with the underwear jokes? Ending the blogger hate
Joe Scarborough warrants, in the words of Jay-Z, only half a bar. He sits at a desk and does interview with flacks and people he works with. An unremarkable former Congressman trumped up into a professional babbler, Scarborough may not be a joke, but as the saying goes, he most definitely plays one on TV. I do find it interesting that fellow MSNBCer Jonathan Alter can speak on blogs as he does, while sharing the studio with people who basically embody the worst aspects of blogging. Alter offers us an unnaunced and warmed-over view of bloggers as mostly a crowd of hecklers, who sit at home popping off and feeding from the trough of presumably legitimate media:
Blogging is a good news/bad news story, too. Daily Kos held a convention last week in Texas full of self-congratulation. Like Thomas Paine and the ideological pamphleteers who provoked the American Revolution, bloggers help enliven and expand public debate. They are indispensable aggregators of political news.
But we're finding this works better for keeping on top of daily flaps than for learning genuinely new information. Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff. It's a lot easier to chew over breaking stories and bash old media. Where do they get the information with which to bash? Often from, ahem, newspapers.
Which are shriveling this year. Talk is cheap and reporting is expensive. Anyone can sit at home pontificating in PJs (I've done it myself), but it costs nearly $1.5 million a year for a bureau in Baghdad. As newspapers lay off hundreds of reporters in the face of assaults on their classified advertising by the likes of Craigslist, who will actually dig for the news?
I find it fascinating that this view is coming from a guy who makes his living giving opinions in print, on TV and online. But let's allow that dog its nap--for today. There are many things wrong with Alter's analysis, but let's begin with the fact that Alter is basically taking the top 5 percent of print journalism--a mature form that's had a chance to iron out its wrinkles--and comparing it to the worst of a very new form. It's true that "anyone can sit at home pontificating in their PJs," but not everyone does it well, which is why some bloggers attract an audience, and some don't. Moreover, the idea that blogging consists of simply spouting off is moronic and reductionist. The first thing I discovered--and this has been repeatedly rammed home to me--is just how much reading I have to do in order to be credible. Frankly, I still don't do enough. But the sheer amount of info you have to absorb, in order to be good, is pretty incredible. The best bloggers may not pick up the phone much--but they do research. It's just not clear to me that talking to some bureacrat is anymore revelatory than reading a ton. It's probably best to do both.
But there is a more problematic notion in Alter's take. As I said it's true that anyone can sit at home in their underwear pontificating, but it's equally true that anyone can pick up the phone and call a mid-level bureaucrat. Folks, the word of the day is credentialism. I'm always amazed that people think it takes years of study at an Ivy, and then more years at a J-school, to learn how to use a phone and structure a story. I learned the basics of journalism during a three month internship, at an alt-weekly in Washington, D.C. when I was 19. That was almost 13 years ago, and the rudiments of the craft--the tenacity and courage to hunt for facts, and an eye for the counterintuitive--have not changed. Journalism isn't like, say, medicine. You can teach kids the basics of journalism--that's why they have high school newspapers, but not high-school brain-surgeons.
I say this as a man with an overwhelming love for journalism. Subtract family, friends and here is the math of me: I am the son of a book publisher. I subscribe to The New Republic--the print version. When I see bloggers linking the latest New Yorker opus on late Sunday or early Monday, I wait until mine comes in the mail. Cut me and, in addition to the Garvey green and red, kid, you'll see black ink spilling everywhere. This is the only thing in my life--besides drumming, and hopefully fathering and supporting my partner--that I have ever been any good at. Print is how I make my admittedly paltry income, and there have been years when I didn't make more then, say, $5000. I'm not complaining--I'm trying to show how much I sympathize with Alter's concerns about the business. Moreover, his point about how much it cost to report is dead-on. The biggest barrier to putting more people of color into the magazine business is the sheer expense of either breaking through as an editor, or having the cash reserves to go out and report as a freelancer. It's a constant, constant (like I'm literally going through it as you read this) struggle.
That said bashing bloggers helps nothing, and is regressive. As a black person, the absolute last thing in the world I want is to go back to an era in which five plutocrats controlled what could be said. Writing--like carpentry or cooking--is a trade that can be done by damn near anyone. But it can't be done well by anyone. We should be humbled by both those realities whenever we--I'm talking about those of us making a living in print--start comparing ourselves to those working on the net. Let's make those comparisons while understanding that the lion-share of our profession consists not of brave, rumpled reporters burning through shoe-leather but utter hacks, and fools who think that journalism is "glamorous." What's true of the world is true of us--most of everything is bad. That goes for carpentry, cooking, blogging--and Newsweek.
Crossposted from www.ta-nehisi.com
That's all it took for me - now I have a crush on you.
I really cannot stand Scarborough - he's such a goddamn loudmouth and his fucking head is empty of everything but {{{{Scarborough!}}}} his ego.
Why are these people even on TV? They're worthless. Maybe I just answered the question...
July 25, 2008 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
A perfect example of a typical blogging apologia that almost pointedly goes out of its way to avoid addressing the issue.
News organizations (which means primarily newspapers) generate the data (news stories) without which there would be nothing upon which bloggers could exercise their wit and acumen.
Since newspapers are supported by ad revenue and since blogs cut in to the ad revenue available both as site competitors and as secondary news sources, are bloggers going to wind up killing the goose that lays the golden egg?
July 25, 2008 6:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, is it OK for people to talk and write about what's in the news?
July 25, 2008 6:59 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yep, but one day there may not be any "news" to write and talk about.
July 25, 2008 7:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
"News organizations (which means primarily newspapers) generate the data (news stories) without which there would be nothing upon which bloggers could exercise their wit and acumen.
Since newspapers are supported by ad revenue and since blogs cut in to the ad revenue available both as site competitors and as secondary news sources, are bloggers going to wind up killing the goose that lays the golden egg?"
A few points:
1.) News orgs, in many cases, do not generate the data and are themselves secondary sources. Take polls for instance. Take when papers are following up a story that another news org broke. Take when they do a story that's based on a report that a nonprofit puts out. Take essays or "news analysis." Furthermore, blogs are not simply responding to reporting. They're often responding to op-eds (as this blog post does) which aren't generating any primary data. Other times--like newspapers--they're responding to a report from a nonprofit. It's reductionist to see blogging as a craft that basically just reacts to primary reporting.
2.)I want to see data showing that blogs are stealing ad-revenue from newspapers. Newspapers have been in trouble for some time, first of all. Second of all, blogs usually have a link that sends traffic to the places they're commenting on. It's quite possible that blogs actually boost traffic by calling attention to particular stories. In fact if blogs disappeared today, newspapers would still be in trouble, because people would still do what they're doing now--reading the papers online, and not buying them. That development isn't the fault of blogs.
3.)Again, this is coming from a guy who makes his living as a print journalist. I make zilch blogging. I desperately want print to be saved--but diagnosing heart disease as cancer isn't the solution.
July 25, 2008 7:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
It came as a surprise to me to be told by a journalism professor that all the "news" stories in the Wall Street Journal that have no byline are simply handouts from the companies that are reprinted as is by the WSJ. What did not at that time occur to me to ask is how many of the bylined articles were initiated by a PR department handout which a "reporter" supplemented by making a few phone calls.
My experience in both Houston and Dallas was that when one city newspaper bought out and closed down its opposition (permitted since Reagan), the result was immediately higher advertising rates followed by a sharp drop-off in investigative news and other competitive news actions that used to be pushed by competition. The surviving newspaper became invariably a booster of the local Chamber of Commerce.
The result was a drop off in circulation, since no one read it after than except to see if their high school kids got news reports on their high school sports achievements.
It's gotten worse since. In Dallas, the Dallas Morning News bought out and shut down the Dallas Times Herald in the early 90's. Since then there has been limited competition between the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Dallas Morning News since the two cities are 35 miles apart and are the two anchors of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. But in recent months the Fort Worth Star-Telegram has reduced its daily size to about 40 pages - roughly the same size of the newspapers I used to throw in the late 1950's in Beaumont,Texas. Beaumont was then about 100,000 people.
This is more competition with TV than with the Internet, and has been long time coming. It is also the death of the downtown department stores who used to provide the advertisements that kept the large newspapers alive and extremely profitable. As the sales, distribution and editorial staff got laid off, the CEO pay kept going up. So did the price of reporters as they became professionalized. A high school grad doesn't get nearly the pay that a college grad does, but the high school grad can do the same job with good editing. The difference is class prejudice, probably a side-effect of the WW II GI bill college graduates. There's too many of them.
Also, Mall stores don't advertise nearly as much as the department stores did. And big box stores especially don't advertise as much as department stores used to.
Unfortunately, much of the previous investigative journalism was apparently a side-effect of oligopoly pricing of newspaper advertising along with the competition between the few news organizations who could dominate a distribution area. Investigative journalism was the journalism equivalent of Bell Labs when AT&T dominated phones. It's not coming back. It's too expensive and does not increase circulation any more.
I don't guarantee that this is the correct analysis, but after teaching corporate strategy a the college level for seven years and being fascinated by newspapers since the late 50's, this sure looks like it to me.
July 25, 2008 9:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, yeah. Why did I study and teach corporate strategy? Because my preferred view of events is the macro view. I want to know what the overall system drives people to do. Once you know that, you can explain over 50% of everything.
Then you look at the top level managers. The key there is what their personality is, what their attitudes are, and what information they can get. That will kick the explanatory power up to about 75% to 80%. After that, the rest is explained by individual actions of non-powerful individuals and by pure luck. The idea that non-top-management individuals don't change much is not popular in the U.S. but it's true. Group, macro-economic, high-level power and macro-sociological factors are much more important than individual actions. The idea that individual attitudes and actions primarily determine individual outcomes is directly related to American racism. It means that the poor can be blamed for being poor and that Blacks can be blamed for their own failures to succeed in general society. Classism and Racism from the point of view of the elite classes.
July 25, 2008 9:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen lets rewrite your statement:
News organizations (which means primarily newspapers) generate the data (news stories) without which there would be nothing upon which TV Pundits (e.g. Joe Scarborough) could exercise their wit and acumen.
July 26, 2008 2:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
I like to repeat the comment I made to Yglesias' similar whine, especially as in the process I cited some TPM Election Central comments about MSM figures I had just read.
And then add: you know it's going to happen, as you mention Alterman crossing the blog/MSM line for quite some time. Soon bloggers will seem no different from old school pundits. So the blogger jokes will stop, but the derogatory jokes won't stop. By being a blogger, you've actually chosen an occupation, punditry, in which it comes with the territory and has been further encouraged by blog culture. So what does it matter the frame the insults are in? Get used to them, they're always going to be there until political commentary culture changes, both internet and not. And if you don't like the trollishness of them, not feeding them and attempting to make your own output above that all that, and discouraging commenters and fans that practice insult culture is all you can do.
Myself, I don't know where I get it from, but I have an eternal optimist hope that "wanker of the day" type blogging culture will eventually grow tiresome to all but a few high school sophomores. And MSM will follow suit, after all, they are ratings driven. Eventually Limbaughism and the reaction to it has to grow tiresome; it's sooo old.
July 25, 2008 7:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's a given. That's the natural order of things. I remember Rolling Stone when it was an underground publication.
But - there will always be loads of room on the internet for "wanker of the day", for RudePundit (hallowed be his handle and his rudeness) and I really get way weary of hearing how things could improve. Things evolved online over many years - this whole thing right here took close to 10 years to get where it is.
And all attempts to shape it have not seen a lot of success. AND THANK THE GODS.
July 25, 2008 8:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let us acknowledge that TPM has actual reporters and has even broken stories. Not just, or even primarily, opinion. That's our department.
July 26, 2008 12:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Newspapers as Secondary Sources, or It's All There on the Internet
Here's an interesting real-time test going on right now.
Yesterday afternoon MsJoanne brought to our attention a Washington Post story which she had picked up from a blogger who had posted earlier in the day.
The WaPo story reports the DoL working as sneaking in an important change to workplace safety rules as the Bush Administration prepares to say sayonara.
I found it interesting that this story -- at least in its raw form -- has been available on the OMB website for the past two weeks. I Googled the story and found no mention prior to the publication of the Washington Post's story. [Note: Perhaps, better or different search terms might change the result]
I, also, checked the AFL-CIO website and its blog expecting that organization to be monitoring DoL and OMB actions closely and was surprised to find that there was no mention of the matter until after the report appeared in the Post.
I suspect that some dissatisfied DoL employee brought the issue to the attention of the Washington Post reporter, and that's how the story broke. Nevertheless, without newspapers and the confidence whistle blowers place in them, there wouldn't have been a story, and we would be the worse off.
The internet for facts and bloggers for opinion are not yet -- if they ever will be -- substitutes for newspapers.
July 26, 2008 8:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Blogging has started off as simply sounding off on news and other opinion. The reasons for this are probably several, but I'll name two that occur to me: 1) It's so EASY to become a blogger that you don't have to think it through to much or commit to the endeavor in any real way. Compare this so IF Stone, an early proto-blogger, who had to go through the trouble and expense of printing and mailing out his views. He did tons of original reporting and digging through primary sources. As I recall, he eschewed the interview or hanging around the WH pressroom in favor of digging through data.
2) The second reason is the lack of resources and reporting infrastructure. It cost money to field reporters, or even spend one's own time on reporting. Where's the money going to come from? As I recall, the big question in the early days of the Internet was, "Yes, it's easy to put stuff up, but hard to get paid for it." Probably because it was so easy to put up and to access. Few readers were willing to pay for material that was so easy to get for free, especially with hundreds of thousands of online choices. You pay for Wapo because it's almost the only print choice in town.
But having said all that, we can see an obvious evolution right here on TWN. Josh is clearly pioneering a "blogging" format that does hard, original reporting combined intelligent commentary and, what no paper does in print, provides a forum for a community of citizen commenters on all of the above. Poorly stated, I'm sorry, but you get my point: The criticism of "bloggers" as pajama-clad parasites HAD some validity at one point, but we are no longer there.
July 26, 2008 10:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Scarborough has got 99 problems, but a brain is not one.
July 26, 2008 6:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Joe Scarborough is an idiot and a water boy carrying hypocrite for the GOP. Him, Mika, and Willy are all a bunch of elitist pricks.
I wish every day that MSNBC still had Don Imus on the air.
July 26, 2008 9:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great post and a very pleasant surprise it was, given that the title led me to believe it was going to be a defense of Mitt Romney.
July 28, 2008 9:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
The part about Scarbrough's show that I don't get, is Harold Ford! What the hell is he playing that Charlie McCarthy role on there for? Does he really need a paycheck that badly? It's not even the "juan williams" way that he refuses to defend the Democratic party when they are dead right on the facts, but it's the seemingly willingness to pile on, albeit in a timid and DLC (right of center) fashion. He really comes off as some kind of token and needs to go! Netroots Nation was right to boo him at the convention. He still seems to be stuck in that mold of trying to win over the love of hard working white people in Tennessee, who will never accept him!
July 28, 2008 10:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
I get where Jonathan Alter is coming from.
Alter is a journalist -- old school, yes, but part of a tradition and craft that has "rules" and "standards". Now, to be fair, there are "journalists" who barely rise to the minimum standards of the craft (National Enquirer? Weekly World News?)
Journalism -- what so many of you decry as "corporate media" -- is finding itself mired in a difficult to escape rut. The hard numbers are there: readership of all kinds of "traditional media" is down while costs to produce are up. Broadcast finds itself in the same situation: viewers down, costs up.
Concurrently, with the increased popularity and availability of the internet, blogging is now more popular than ever. Alter is right. Anyone can blog. You do not need to be affiliated with a "legitimate" news organization to make "news." See the supposed "Utah soldier" who claimed Obama dissed the troops by not shaking their hands at one stop. A false story widely reported as "fact" because it appeared on a soldier's blog (posted by his wife?).
And Alter is right, out of the millions who blog, especially on national news, few pick up the phone to check sources (as they have no sources with which to corroborate the info), few conduct independent interviews or attend press conferences or have editors checking and re-checking their stories for accuracy. It is "type and click", "point and send." (Even TPM doesn't give the conscientious blogger an opportunity to edit their posts.)
The "research" Mr. Coates refers to is often no more than a visit to Wikipedia, Google or the bloggers favorite site, where imprecise "quotes" are plucked from one page and dropped into another. That's not research. Most bloggers don't get publisher's pre-release or early release books or galleys. Most bloggers are too busy churning out content to do the serious research that "traditional journalists" do every day. Ben Smith of Politico once let it slip that he and his compatriots are expected to drop a blog once an hour. That's quantity-based, not quality. Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd or Frank Rich or Bob Herbert are responsible for two or three columns a week.
And let me refute the notion that one must have an Ivy-league education and graduate school to be a good journalist. You don't. But good journalists don't get their credentials out of a box of Crackerjacks. You don't just "pick up the phone and call some mid-level bureaucrat" either. Writing cannot be done by damn near anyone. Typing is different. But "writing" requires a more advanced skillset. And Mr. Coates makes a serious mistake when he suggests that writing is "trade" like carpentry or cooking. Even those professions differentiate between "cooks" and "chefs," between "woodworkers" and "rough carpenters." Just because you can follow a recipe, it doesn't make you Paul Bocuse or Julia Child.
Finally, some bloggers need to be bashed. They traffic rumor and innuendo, and survive only because of the echo chamber that is provided by the internet. "Reporting" is becoming nothing more that an exercise of even responsible (and I hesitated to use that word, but did anyway) or repeating what somebody else said somebody else said. That is, Ben Smith repeating Greg Sargent repeating Mark Halperin repeating Marc Ambinder repeating Greg Sargent repeating Josh Marshall repeating Mayhill Fowler repeating Jake Tapper repeating Kos repeating...
That ain't reporting.
Take blogging for what it is: a chance for most of us to stop yelling at the TV screen and yell with our friends (and at our "enemies") in cyberworld. If we're lucky, sometimes sombody hears us in all of the din.
But "new journalism"? Not at all.
July 28, 2008 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are right on Jade!
July 29, 2008 10:44 AM | Reply | Permalink