Blame the Blogger

I thought I might quote John Quiggin's witticism: "In the February edition of Prospect, William Skidelsky has a piece on the decline of book reviewing. As is standard for any adverse trend in the early 21st century, blogs get a fair bit of the blame."

Indeed. In particular, in recent months I've noticed a tendency on the part of certain fogies to try to accuse me personally, or else bloggers more generally, for the structural decline of the newspaper and, in particular, of the uniquely American model of a professionalized objective press. This as if the newspaper business were in tip-top shape as of mid-2002 and really only went into sharp decline when the Great Orange Satan moved to his community-based format and started seeing skyrocketing traffic. In truth almost every trend that people seem inclined to blame on blogs was under way long before there were any blogs. The internet has, in many instances, provided the first glimmer of hope in decades that long-dwindling media forms may be replaced by something.

Comments

Surely what contributed to the rise of the politically oriented blogs was disatisfaction with the state of American journalism. My own introduction to the blog world came through a site called Media Whores Online.

Posted by blah | February 26, 2008 1:31 PM

sorry, matthew, you have to spill: which "fogies" in particular think that journalism was in some kind of golden age only minutes ago?

life is short; i need to know whom to ignore altogether.

Posted by howard | February 26, 2008 1:52 PM

Answering howard, I'd say Sam Zell's close.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | February 26, 2008 2:05 PM

Eye here their m4d u kant speel.

Posted by MikeJ | February 26, 2008 2:06 PM

Funny, here in red state land I do give the Internet and blogs much of the CREDIT for the decline of the newspaper business. My local paper is in the tank for the GOP. Previously I had very few alternatives to the crap spewed out by the Indianapolis Star but now I can pick and choose online for perspectives closer to my own.

It's more than that actually. The Indy Star managed to insult me about twelve different ways on an average day. It is pretty clear that their editors hate people like me and they slant all their stories in a way that damages my own self-interest. After they'd managed to call me a traitor for the hundredth time I finally wrote a nice GBCW letter to the editor and canceled my subscription.

Do I miss it? Not a chance. Hey, if I wanted to read Jonah Goldberg and Cal Thomas I can go online and find their tripe anytime I like. I don't need to subsidize their GOP propaganda. Good riddance to them.

Did blogs lead me to drop the Indianapolis Star? Not on their own. If the local newspapers product wasn't so poor I might still be a subscriber but the availability of news on the Internet sure has made doing without so much easier.

Posted by Curt M | February 26, 2008 2:06 PM

Curt M has a good point. And newspapers don't need to be ideologically skewed to be crappy. Simple inadequate coverage of issues or sensationalistic coverage of non-scandals will suffice.

I have my concerns about the echo-chamber effect of the blogosphere, but the more it can undermine traditional media, the better. Because traditional media sucks at informing people.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | February 26, 2008 2:21 PM

That's right Matt - I'm holding you personally responsible for Scott Templeton's fabulism and the decline of the Baltimore Sun.

Posted by McKingford | February 26, 2008 2:29 PM

As much as I applaud the much-welcomed and vastly-improved coverage of politics that the blogosphere has a right to take credit for, I have to say Skidelsky has a point.

There are a lot of great political and economic bloggers working at present. Literary and artistic bloggers, though, in my estimation, universally suck. If there are people out there who are writing engaging, perceptive, well-written book reviews (or any other arts criticism) online, I sure haven't found them--in fact, I'd rate the best online arts-and-culture writers at about the level I'd expect from a free weekly in, say, Dayton or Fresno.

(Disclaimers: 1) I only skimmed the linked article and 2) I'm not familiar with the UK literary scene to which he makes many specific references.)

Posted by James Gary | February 26, 2008 3:11 PM

"the Great Orange Satan"

I'm guessing this is either a reference to the Daily Kos, or the now-ubiquitous RSS icon, but I'm too old a fogey to get it. Can someone plug me in?

Posted by cmholm | February 26, 2008 3:24 PM

I think you're confusing two complaints.

If you read more business-oriented coverage of this, you'd see they weren't blaming blogs at all for the death of newspapers, but Craig's List and Ebay before that for stealing all the classified advertising and Google ads et. al. for stealing a lot of the rest. After all, most major blogs are regularly linking to newspaper websites.

The other argument is about a change in journalism effected by blogs, not the death of newspapers. And I am quite sympathetic to some of that, the whole Great Orange Satan thing has some merit to it as I see it driving reportorial coverage and resources more and more skewed to vox populi. Ted Turner's CNN forced people to get interested in hard news and broad coverage, but that didn't make enough money for those who followed them, especially after they got competition, not enough numbers of viewers, and the way to get more was to go after the stories a larger number of people would watch, or create clubs where people wouldn't miss the program.

They shouldn't be picking you as an example at all because you promote the Ted Turner type breadth, not just another spin on the most popular water cooler talking point of the day. But I do think a lot of the bigger blogs are contributing to that which talk radio started: everyone talking and covering the same thing. The blogosphere has become a major focus group for editors of newspapers and producers of cable television news on what they should cover. The audience and theirs is very similar and goes back and forth.

That you are with an elite publication like The Atlantic for a salary instead of trying to live on getting high numbers for advertising dollars on a blog of your own should tell you something about how money frees you from the covering what "the blogsophere" wants to talk about. Check out how many comments and page views you have when you want to post about North Korea, homelessness in the U.S., or the latest at the IMF, if you were on your own that would require subsidization with lots of hot Obama vs. Clinton scandal stories to keep them numbers clicking on you.

Posted by artappraiser | February 26, 2008 3:55 PM

I'm guessing this is either a reference to the Daily Kos, or the now-ubiquitous RSS icon, but I'm too old a fogey to get it. Can someone plug me in?

It's a reference to Kos.

Posted by Kevin | February 26, 2008 4:01 PM

Media Whores Online! With the cute horses in hats! I loved that blog! It's amazing that blogs have been around long enough that we can be nostalgic about them.

Posted by Bloix | February 26, 2008 4:55 PM

I'm a bit surprised you couldn't sneak a plug for your book somewhere in this post.

Posted by Eric the Political Hack | February 26, 2008 7:34 PM

I stopped reading the Chicago Tribune when it became obvious that they could not think of one reason not to invade Iraq and that, as Curt M, I grew tired of being insulted by it. I am very pleased to see the decline in the Trib's circulation and I really want to see the death of the American newspaper. And the internet is one reason I can say that. I don't have to rely on the conservative idiots who work at American newspapers for news.

Posted by Mark | February 27, 2008 12:05 AM

I stopped reading the Chicago Tribune when it became obvious that they could not think of one reason not to invade Iraq and that, as Curt M, I grew tired of being insulted by it. I am very pleased to see the decline in the Trib's circulation and I really want to see the death of the American newspaper. And the internet is one reason I can say that. I don't have to rely on the conservative idiots who work at American newspapers for news.

Posted by Mark | February 27, 2008 12:06 AM

I stopped reading the Chicago Tribune when it became obvious that they could not think of one reason not to invade Iraq and that, as Curt M, I grew tired of being insulted by it. I am very pleased to see the decline in the Trib's circulation and I really want to see the death of the American newspaper. And the internet is one reason I can say that. I don't have to rely on the conservative idiots who work at American newspapers for news.

Posted by Mark | February 27, 2008 12:07 AM

This is just another instance of "my shortcomings are your fault." Anyone who has ever been married knows all about this.

Posted by Gene | February 27, 2008 10:22 AM

Sidelski's thoughts led me to go back and sample some of Edmund Wilson's reviewing from the thirties. It's still bracing to read the old cannonneer, and rueful to imagine that there was once an audience sufficiently literate to keep up with his allusions and quotes. Be that as it may, even Wilson had his share of real stinkers, as when he dismissed A. Powell as second rate Proust. Any reviewer does.
I think the quality of reviewing available on the net on the web is superb.

Posted by Dick Mulliken | February 27, 2008 10:49 AM

The internet is responsible for the decline of newspapers, but it has nothing to do with blogs.

Newspapers were an incredibly cash rich business where the executives could spend tons of money and live lazy lives while their sure-fire cash cow generated huge profits. Then the Internet mortally wounded classified advertising and the buckets of easy money dried up. Then the finger pointing started, the bloated executive suites became a battleground. The executives actually started paying attention to the substance of the paper and the staffs. Everyone started protecting turf and looking for ways to make money.

Meanwhile the Internet was making the content increasingly irrelevant and exposing the advertising as expensive.

I have first-hand experience of this from the executive suite of a group of major newspapers. Blogs came into popularity long after the economic factors, long after other aspects of the Internet had an impact.

Periodic print media, newspapers and magazines, are walking corpses.

Posted by Sherry | February 27, 2008 11:51 AM