Matt Klam’s NYT article on bloggers has gotten a fair amount of attention from the blogosphere. Some are ticked off that conservative and libertarian bloggers weren’t mentioned. Some feel that he should have gotten into the nuances of the different types of bloggers. They totally missed the point of the article.
What Matt does brilliantly is to convey the thrill and the optimism mixed with self doubt that moves the bloggers. It doesn’t really matter what they blog about. Most bloggers, especially those who are complete devoted to their craft, feel that they are part of a new movement. They might not know where this is all leading to, but still their passion drives them to neglect their spouses, skip Thursday Must See TV, and post until the wee hours of the night. The bloggers are fueled by phenomenal hit counts and evidence of urls from the Executive Office of the President and the L.A. Times.
Matt compares the bloggers to the young journalists who followed around the candidates in the 1972 election as documented in Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus. (A damn good book, and my brother better return my copy.) These writers were hungry and talented. R. W. Apple could write the quickest lead. Hunter Thompson was a loose cannon. They also were an incestuous little group that together helped set the agenda for the ’72 election.
Those journalists that Crouse followed are still around today. In the Times cover, Jack Germond and Apple stand behind Wonkette at the computer. But their bellies tell the story. They have gotten slow and jaded, while new voice armed with an Airport card are taking their place.
The news media helped create the modern campaign, and now they seem to be stuck in it. The bloggers, by contrast, adapted quickly. By the time the Republican convention rolled around in August, they had figured something out, staying far, far away from that zoo down at Madison Square Garden. They had begun to work the way news people do at manufactured news events, by sticking together, sharing information, repeating one another’s best lines. They were learning their limitations, and at the same time they were digging around and critiquing and fact-checking and raising money. They still liked posting dirty jokes and goofy Photoshopped pictures of politicians, but they had hope, and more than a few new ideas, and they were determined to make themselves heard.
And are bloggers setting a political agenda? The jury is still out. But judging from the number of recent articles on blogging, they have succeeded in turning the spot light on themselves.
Apt. 11d 
I don’t know. It seems like most of the ink spilled about blogs (or should that be photons pixilated?) is concerned with a very narrow band of the blogosphere. It’s rather like getting excited about books and only talking about partisan tell-alls. A weblog is a medium, a method of communication — that some happen to have politics as their content says little about blogging in a larger sense; it’s more about how people talk about politics than anything else.
Granted, the phenomenon of poli-blogging (which, I add, is itself a subset of people using blogs to talk about political topics — not everyone models his or her political approach or discourse or topics after folks like Atrios) is an interesting one, but as a non-poli-blogger, I get tired sometimes of this sort of Johnny-one-note coverage.
LikeLike
In the once over I gave Klam’s article, I would think that the rightys and libertarians would be glad Klam didn’t comment on them. About all he did was insult the bloggers he covered.
LikeLike