My dad just started a blog. OK, I started the blog for him as a birthday present, and he’s on the verge of really taking to it. The idea behind it was to get him up to speed on the future of digital journalism public so he feels more prepared when he hits his master’s program in International Journalism in the fall at Cardiff University in Wales.
It feels like I’ve been talking more and more about blogs and blogging of late, amplified in no small part by my first experience actually teaching public relations at the University (more on that whole experience later). What I’ve taken from all this discussion is that, primarily, people are taking to this stuff. They’re reading them. They’re writing them. They’re appreciating them. They’re learning about their friends and family, and they love being in on the scoop when part of their circle has something profound to say about the world.
So it’s frustrating when I stumble across old-world journalists who see blogs as self-righteous and pitiful. In a recent call to arms for traditionalists, Frank Catalano writes of blogging:
Sure, blogging is a new publishing mechanism (sort of). But it has more in common with wanna-bes who self-publish deathless prose through vanity presses, or pre-teens who pour their hearts out into diaries with flimsy locks, or little old ladies who write poetry with quill pens to read to their cats and store in the sock drawer, than with actual, grab-your-audience-by-the-hair (or other body parts) and get’em to think writing.
This is chronic hyperbole, and at some level, I’m ashamed that this is the quote I’ve picked to represent his piece. But it’s the one that makes the hair stand on the back of my neck, and that’s the way it is.
See, Catalano’s not doing service to the point. It doesn’t matter what people are writing on their websites to journalism-at-large, it matters to the handful of people who read them. The beauty of blogging, and the real boon of the blog to the traditionalists, is that the important stuff — the stuff that changes worlds — bubbles to the top and makes its way to the rest of us.
Catalano’s own blog, Byte Me Online, is one that I actually read. It’s infuriating that this rant does more disservice to people with a yen to write to their own little audiences than to teach the point about actually finding an audience for a speculative blog.
I say the more, the merrier.
Never mind the sweet irony that I never would have discovered Catalano’s piece were it not for another blog. Such is the point:
Like pubs, weblogs can become a huge part of the everyday life of both individuals and a community. Unlike the bricks, mortar, and beer on tap pubs, you get to the digital variety by simply turning on your computer and “walking” into the URL. Time and space become of secondary importance, though we often find that we want to hang out there when something big is happening in the world around us.
I like this for the echo of the often sweet innocence of some blogs and the tough critique of others. The importance of weblogs lies less in the ability of the writer to present the world than in the reader’s ability to assimilate it, which is what journalism was all about once.