Copyright ©1997-2008 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Copyright ©1997-2008 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo
� Mother of All Atheists | Main | Where We Dump �Another ass-backwards story on blogging, now in the New York Times. Bob Tedeschi is no Luddite, nor is he unfamiliar with Internet culture. He knows technology. So I ask how he wound up with a Ecommerce story on blogging which opens with a recital of the statistics and then a practically open dismissal of blogging's future (damning through faint praise, I guess) before addressing the business side.
Further, his choice of a journalism figure blogging away on their own dime wasn't Doc Searls, Paul Andrews, Dan Gillmor, J.D. Lasica, Jim Romenesko, Deborah Branscum (or even yours truly), but Dan Perkins, a cartoonist who does This Modern World. I like the cartoon and Dan is a political thinker. But he's no journalist: he's an essayist and advocate. He doesn't write reportage. Joe Bob says, blog fu.
I don't mean to trot out the usual suspects every time someone mentions blogging and journalism, but we have some folks who are doing the real deal: reporting on their site, writing analysis, interviewing people, creating something bigger than synthesis involving new facts. Commentary is good and interesting, but it isn't Big J or little j journalism. (Journalism's tradition only spans to the late 1800s, if that, in its current form; commentary stretches thousands and thousands of years.) But another way: journalism is asking other people why things work the way they do, and trying to ask enough people to paint a picture of the truth; commentary is asking yourself.
Of course, in the way of these things, the central part of the article was quite solid, showing quantitative and qualitative interest, and the development of business-oriented blogging. Tedeschi missed mentioning that Pyra (Blogger.com) had a strategic investment from Trellix, which has a business software business. I found that omission odd, especially since Trellix leads us to Dan Bricklin, a business-software pioneer.
Posted by Glennf at February 25, 2002 7:53 AM TrackBack URL for this entry: Why newspapers don't get weblogging.. Becuase they have to sell newspapers..if they had to sell stuff like webistes and web psace or web ads then there might be chance of them gettign what a weblog is.. Of course Iam one of the fe that has stopped reading newspapers ..I get my information from weblogs, nes sites that dont have you sign up to read soemthing, and other sources.. But I am sure I am wrong..just like that stubborn old librarian that thinks internet is evil and satan's own child.. Posted by: Fred Grott at February 25, 2002 11:21 AM Dan Gillmor weighs in on the persistence of blogging. Posted by: Glenn Fleishman at February 25, 2002 11:17 AM yeah, but Bob, like me, is a freelancer. What does he care about the nature of the Times? That's where this whole BigPub argument breaks down, for me. The individual reporters aren't explicitly carrying out the larger agenda of the publication. Most of these articles are essays which the reporter or essayist comes up with and gets to write. It's more about fighting the last war (will dotcoms succeed?) than about what people are doing with the technology, I think. Posted by: Glenn Fleishman at February 25, 2002 11:08 AM Bob Tedeschi For him to write about and interview the great bloggers, would be to legitimatize the blogging concept, and de-emphasize the imperial nature of the NYTimes. Hence why would smart people read the Times, if there is better, passionate and more inovative journalism being written in blogs. The Times is a great paper, but it isn't the only place there is great writing. Posted by: Buzz Bruggeman at February 25, 2002 11:03 AM I've cross-blogged by posting a comment on your blog. Posted by: Glenn Fleishman at February 25, 2002 10:47 AM I posted my thoughts this weekend about that National Post article about weblogs. The author did a nice job of sucking up to Dave, but I don't think he really understands weblogs. Not as bad as the NYT piece, but I was surprised that others seemed to think it was right-on. Posted by: Seth Dillingham at February 25, 2002 10:37 AM
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