When I was originally hired by the Advocate Weekly chain as their "Web guy" in late 2005, my job was to revamp the online presence of their four print publications. One of my first initiatives was to help the newspaper editors start blogging on their sites. As someone coming from the digital world to print, in effect I became a sort of diplomat, trying to help the two sides understand one another.
It's been far from a simple task. As clearly as newspaper people can see they need to master the new technologies and as eager as bloggers are to find a financially viable way to support themselves, fear, insecurity, and false assumptions have kept both the traditional print, radio and television reporters and their digital descendants from seeing each other clearly and finding a mutually beneficial common ground.
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I've known bloggers all my life.
Long before there was an Internet, my childhood friend, Michael, had a wiki-like memory for all things horror movie-related. I liked scary movies, too, but Michael was a fanatic. As kids in the '70s, we contented ourselves with the classic American monsters (Frankenstein and the Mummy) and the pantheon of Japanese city-stompers (Godzilla and Mothra). But being teens in the early '80s, we had front row seats for the golden age of slash and gore movies, and Michael saw everything.
On occasion, he'd drag me an hour or more from home to some seedy dive with sticky floors that was the only place screening a particular bloodbath. No matter how dreadful the movie, we always waited until the very last credit because Michael was committing them to memory and timing the length of the movie with his digital wrist watch.
When he got home, he sat at his typewriter, and banged out a full-length review of the movie, a paragraph-long synopsis with a star rating, and a digest of all the technical and crew information he'd gleaned. Though at times he'd managed to get a gig writing reviews for local papers, Michael did not have a publisher for the overwhelming bulk of his work.
But this didn't mean his work went unread: he published a splatter movie 'zine himself.
Even if his parents, friends and teachers begged him to not to go into detail about what distinguished the latest set of cinematic mutilations he'd witnessed, other devoted fans around the world (he had a strong following in Australia) actually paid for the privilege by subscribing. He started out painstakingly assembling his pages with purple mimeographs, but he'd graduated to photocopies by the time he won a scholarship to film school.
I don't know the fate of the 'zine beyond high school—we fell out of touch—but a few years after college, I happened to pick up a copy of a magazine he and I had enjoyed as kids and wasn't particularly surprised to see he'd landed himself the job of managing editor.
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Not long after the Valley Advocate began hosting blogs on its website, one of our news bloggers was invited onto a local radio show to discuss a story he had researched, written and posted to the site. Before describing the story or its arguments, the show's host first decided to try his hand at classifying bloggers and defining their relationship to broadcasters like himself. Whatever intellectual curiosity had initiated the inquiry devolved quickly to chest-thumping.
As the blogger tried to describe what he did, the broadcaster objected when he tried to use words like "journalist" or "correspondent," feeling it blurred the distinction between amateur and professional. The blogger could write all he wanted, but he wasn't a reporter. He didn't have the degrees and he hadn't paid the dues. They never got to discussing a word he had written—why he'd been invited on the show in the first place.
Though it's rarely expressed so blatantly, the confrontation was a fair portrayal of the dynamic in print and broadcast newsrooms across the world, keeping things polarized.
It's my belief that this stalemate has cost both sides dearly. Each has something the other needs and wants. By trying to marginalize bloggers, traditional media have missed what could be the remedy for slumping sales and status. And by trying so hard to command respect as independent pioneers, many bloggers have argued themselves out of what they're really after: a job.
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There's no need to bully bloggers.
Listening to the radio skirmish at the time, I wanted to jump in and set things straight so they could get on to actually discussing the blogger's work. Putting the blogger in his place was pointless. There were two distinctions between the broadcaster and the blogger worthy of note: the radio guy wouldn't have been talking to the blogger if he weren't paid to do so; and at the time, the blogger was working without remuneration. The radio host had a station manager and corporate owners to report to, but the blogger reported only to himself. (The Valley Advocate exercises no editorial control over our online contributors.)
The bargain is the same one my friend who was obsessed with horror movies made back in the 1980s. It's one many people I've known who were both passionate and communicative have made, and it's a choice that has little to do with economics or professional status. These people have a burning need to document their subjects, comment on them, and publish their work. Knowing no newspaper, television station or radio show is likely to publish or broadcast them, they incur their own low-tech expenses, do things on the cheap, and start building a mailing list.
The media has often portrayed bloggers as poaching on the turf of traditional reporters, wondering if bloggers would one day replace them.The affront is really to editors and publishers. Word processors have allowed authors to produce professional-looking text for a long time. What's revolutionary about blog technology is that it enables authors to disseminate their work globally. Unlike traditional reporters, bloggers get their word out into the world without having to ask permission, without fear of crossing an arbitrary line an employer set.
While I was given a free hand to develop a stable of bloggers on the Valley Advocate website, the editors and publishers of the Connecticut Advocates were more resistant to what I thought was a key requirement for a successful blogger: they should not already be on the editorial staff of the paper. While the papers eventually looked beyond their own ranks, at first it was too much to ask for them to invite outsiders to spout forth unedited on a screen that had the name of their traditional publication at the top.
Instead, they tried to get their staff writers blogging,. Generally, staff that already had stories to write and deadlines to meet weren't keen to contribute to a blog, too. When they did, their posts either were too brief or felt like work that wasn't good enough to print. There was little passion in what they did, and many of the blogs sputtered and died quiet deaths. No one, including their authors, missed them.
On a hilltop on the edge of Portland, Ore., there's a tremendous bronze statue of a man in a suit gazing across the city's downtown and pointing to the horizon. He wasn't a politician, religious figure, or financial wizard. He worked for a newspaper. Harvey W. Scott was the editor of the Oregonian between 1866 and 1872, and during his brief tenure, he argued passionately for the preservation of the Union during the Civil War and sang the praises of the emerging Republican party. After he retired, he authored the first history of the state.
These days, editors are lucky if, after they die, they've got the remains of a tattered 401K left for their family to remember them by. Forget about being bronzed and placed in a public park. Rather than judging success by how many hearts and minds have been persuaded, what matters most to publishers today is how many eyeballs have scanned their publication. In response, many newspapers these days, facing a dismal economy and dwindling circulation numbers, have let writers and editors go in droves; they've focused on redesigning their publications and emphasizing the graphics. Though rarely expressed, the logic appears to be that readers are turning away from traditional media because the Web has a more dynamic, colorful appearance. I think this misses the point entirely.
Once, to get a sense of perspective, avid news readers picked up both the paper they agreed with and the one they were sure was full of lies. Today, with traditional media organizations consolidating and reducing the options available, people read the newspaper available and watch the evening report that's on, and then they turn to the bloggers they like to find out what to think of it all. Until the traditional news media are willing to care about their role as watchdogs and arbiters of justice as seriously as what typeface they're going to put their headlines in, news consumers are going to continue to nibble at what the mainstream offers and get their nutrition elsewhere.
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While newspapers struggle to find an editorial mix that works, there have been a number of efforts by local bloggers to organize and create hub sites that connect their various online enterprises into a single, hydra-headed publication. As with their traditional counterparts, they're looking for a way to make a living from what they love to do. I've attended some meetings where the bloggers try to work out the logistics; the bloggers seem to have spent too much time listening to what the traditional media say. They think of themselves as writers, not publishers. They ask, "How can we operate as a collaborative, make money and maintain quality?"
My guess is they can't. By thinking of themselves as writers connected by a hub, they see themselves as forging a new kind of business model: a place where fiercely independent people can work together. But that's what traditional newspapers are, with the fierce independence continually giving way to the ostensible demands of business.
My hope is that, as traditional big media get battered to bits for having given up their role as spirited watchdogs, bloggers and the few remaining indy media outlets will take over, forging a relationship where independent writers can find established publications to host them and pay them for the traffic they attract. Maybe they can do together what they can't do alone. Maybe one day they'll begin bronzing editors again.
