Andrew Sullivan: Blogging is the Golden Era of Journalism
Sullivan’s piece in the November issue of The Atlantic is the best think piece about blogging I’ve seen, and its connections to, as well as its extension of the practice of journalism.
Sullivan writes that blogging is jazz to established journalism’s classical music. One doesn’t replace the other, but each requires a different way of performing, a different way of listening and interacting. Each complement and enhance appreciation of the other.
In fact, for all the intense gloom surrounding the news-paper and magazine business, this is actually a golden era for journalism. The blogosphere has added a whole new idiom to the act of writing and has introduced an entirely new generation to nonfiction. It has enabled writers to write out loud in ways never seen or understood before. And yet it has exposed a hunger and need for traditional writing that, in the age of television’s dominance, had seemed on the wane.
Sullivan says that the platform defines the style and interaction.
Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.
This drags us to a bigger question, one that goes beyond the rather petty distraction of bloggers vs journalism:
Why are we publishing our public radio journalism on a computer screen in almost the exact same way as we publish it to an electrical signal transmitted through the air?
Television requires a different kind of journalism than does radio. So what is the appropriate, legitimate and journalistically sound way for public radio and TV to translate its reporting to the web?
By copying and pasting reporter’s scripts to the site? Probably not. This is a big challenge. What are we dreaming up? What experiments are we conducting? Are we being too prissy and unimaginative about the platform?
The pasting of the reporter scrips while unimaginative and IS a horrid user experience, I've heard many a pub radio reporter say they just don't have time to rewrite a story for the web after they have reported – gathered the sound – edited the piece got it on air and have to get another story done for another news cast. It not like they don't want to, they just feel overwhelmed as it is.
Also the pub radio reporters I know haven't had the same pressure (the do it or be fired conversations) to produce cross platform like their print counter parts. There isn't the same sense of urgency to produce cross platform outside of NPR Washington at the member station level.
Public radio reporters can be expected to do some of this work, and they do already, but certainly not all of it. I'm talking about more people, potentially, not making a small number of reporters work to the point where they're not producing content they're proud of. Thanks for your comments!
I actually will go to a site like npr.org or wfpl.org to read a reporter's transcript, simply because I heard a part of a story and want the whole deal, but don't want to download the audio file. So, while it would be a better use of the medium to expand the stories, I disagree that it is a horrid user user experience. It's public RADIO, not public INTERACTIVE MULTIMEDIA, so I don't expect that much more.
Rob – Thanks for the comment!