Blogging As a Vocation

For all the coverage of the so-called "Web logging" phenomenon at the convention, I think people have been missing the real story here which is the breakdown of the barriers between blogs and "traditional" media. Last night, for example, I was hanging out with a group of bloggers at a bar in Cambridge. But were we really a group of bloggers? Jeralyn Merrit, unambiguously, is a blogger -- i.e. a person with a real job that has nothing to do with media but who also writes a blog. Duncan "Atrios" Black has been a blogger in that sense until the extremely recent past, but lately he seems to be doing some "real" journalism with Media Matters and now that he has a proper byline I expect we'll see more and more of that. Along with his Internet fame and strong writing skills, after all, he turns out to have some legitimate policy expertise. I was an amateur blogger for a long time but I'm now a professional journalist (here at the convention on "real" journalist credentials) who does a professional blog and an amateur one along with my magazine articles, columns, etc.

Also around the table were Ezra Klein and Zoe Wanderwolk, two college students who do blogs both of whom are currently interning for The Washington Monthly and The Gadflyer, respectively. Rounding the group out (I think) were Tom Lang and Brian Montopoli who write Campaign Desk for The Columbia Journalism Review which certain is a blog, but is also a professional enterprise and edited to boot. Brian had worked quite a bit in print and traditional web (things like Slate and TNR Online) before getting this gig, and Tom was an intern at the Prospect when I started there. Tom Schaller has a slightly jaundiced take on this whole phenomenon, but the point either way is that blogging per se has probably jumped the shark and rightly so.

At the end of the day, blogging is just a mode of presenting text (and, to some extent, images) and a set of computer programs that make it easy to present text in that way. It's not a method of doing things. The result, I think, is that the phenomenon of the "blogger" has no real future, though the phenomenon of the blog does. At the end of the day, Brad DeLong is an economist, Lawrence Solum is a legal theorist, I'm a commentator, Jeralyn is a criminal justice expert, Laura Rozen is a national security reporter, etc. These are trades -- areas of competence, whatever -- that we can all ply in a variety of media, print, web articles, blogs, academic papers (where appropriate), live or taped radio or television interviews, etc. None of us are "bloggers" except in the sense that we all write weblogs. But we also talk about this stuff to people and that doesn't make us "talkers," it's a thing you do not a thing you are and, increasingly, it will be done by more-or-less the exact same group of people who are producing text in other formats.