Huh. Been a while, hasn't it?

It almost seems inevitable that this thing has come back to life - things have changed so dramatically in the media landscape in the past year. Before, when I tried to start this thing, it was half-hearted; I've always been a little leery of blogging and the sense of self-indulgence that comes along with it, but now, chronicling the events that are going on now (and dissecting them, and possibly predicting what comes next) seems more urgent - like we have to figure out what's going on before it's too late. That's probably a little, um, self-indulgent though.

At any rate, the signs were probably already there a year ago, but now they're pretty much impossible to ignore. Whether or not the decline of print media is a good thing is certainly up for debate at this point - and it's an issue that this blog will be exploring - but first, before we delve into that realm, let's look at one of the major alternatives to print media that's arisen in the past few years - blogging itself.

A pretty decent introduction to blogging is conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan's piece in the Atlantic entitled "Why I Blog". Sullivan argues that blogging changes the media game (which it does) due to a few particular inherent characteristics.
First is the idea of hyperlinking. Here's an example: in print media, readers would have to rely solely on my summary and interpretation of Sullivan's piece. With blogging (and the internet in general), it takes very little effort to provide access to primary reference documents.

Next is the idea that blogs occupy a different temporal space than traditional print media, or at least operate on a different cycle - blogs are able to react on a much quicker basis than a paper, for obvious reasons.

Finally, Sullivan argues that with blogs, the barriers between writer and reader are much more permeable, as comment features allow for much more potential dialogue (and scathing critique) between journalist and reader than traditional media models.

These three major features, combined with other factors, make blogs a pretty alluring new media form. One can argue that the way they function serves as a "democratization" of media - anyone can have a blog, and by providing easy access to primary reference sources and giving instant feedback, part of the power of journalist as "gatekeeper/arbiter" of information is somewhat transferred to the greater public. As Sullivan puts it,

"The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production."

Journalism shouldn't always look like a conversation, however. While blogging is now pretty much a necessity to media (I can't think of any major news outlet that doesn't have an online presence now), in its current form, it supplements and supports - it doesn't replace.

A perfect example of the shortcomings of blogging would be one of its supposed strengths - hyperlinking. In an almost parasitic fashion, blogs rely on hyperlinks as story starters - most blogs either synthesize other people's information or post reactions to it, (sort of like this blog - oops!) but they don't do the research themselves. When print media dries up, so do the primary sources - and without the links, the blogs don't have a lot. It's true that there's nothing stopping from bloggers from doing the research themselves, but with the near-instant pace of online media - where getting it first is more important than getting it fully - that idea doesn't seem compatible with current trends.

Other issues with blogging include the pitfalls of user-generated content when it comes to journalism - I think I'll explore this more in future posts, but there's an underlying danger in shifting the power dynamic to the reader - just like how media shouldn't be accountable to corporate or special interests, I also think that the journalist shouldn't be beholden to public opinion, in some cases.

These are just some of the issues that surround blogs as a medium - some of these can probably be attributed to the fact that blogging is still relatively in its infancy - it'll be interesting to see how it develops and what the infrastructure surrounding it will look like. We've barely begun to scratch the surface of how new media models are changing the media landscape, but future posts will explore this more - this post was intended solely as a primer, a reminder that the way I'm exploring this ISP holds certain strengths - and limitations.