Crossposted on One Million Strong
Changes are coming at the American Prospect with Ezra Klein shutting down his own blog to move to the Prospect website and Garance Franke-Routa moving to the Washington Post.
In her farewell post, Garance raises a number of interesting questions about the future of the blogosphere, tracing its recent history, and noticing the rise of the so-called "Mainstream Blogosphere" ––– the move of journalists from the mainstream media into the new forum of blogging and web video:
The New York Times today has 51 blogs. The Washington Post has more than 100. The Atlantic has developed a stable of bloggers, drawing on writers from The Economist, The American Prospect, and National Journal’s Hotline, as well as their existing staff. Time.com hired former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox and now is increasingly moving in the direction of web video; today’s hire of Salon’s Mike Scherer, who has done a fun series of political videos over the past year using VideoDog, only underscores the point. Bloggingheads.tv has gone big-time, and is now sometimes featured on the homepage of The New York Times, as well as regularly on the Opinion page. Video magazine Slate V has debuted and quickly become an online success. And reporters like Dan Balz and Adam Nagourney are now blogging regularly, at The Trail and The Caucus, respectively.
Political parties and campaign committees, as well as think tanks, lobbyists, and NGO's, all now have blogs. The Obama campaign probably has at least a dozen, ranging from the latest news to issue-specific blogs on health care policy and technology issues to state-specific blogs in the early states to group-specific blogs like Students for Barack Obama.
The question, of course, for journalists should always be: Is the web just another medium for journalists to do the same thing they've always been doing? Just another place to have access to the same articles? Or is the medium fundamentally different?
All in all, I'm less excited about the development of mainstream media's web video. The New York Times has been doing some great things, but I find myself impatient with the efforts of Salon and Time.
More interesting to me has been watching how different journalists adapt to the medium. I'll give a few examples.
The American Prospect's blog Tapped has always been distinguished by its friendly and engaging banter amongst the bloggers.
Chris Cillizza, in many ways, has been one of the most savvy journalist bloggers, with his many weekly features, his popular weekly Line of the most competitive races, and his insider gossip --- these features seem to me to have taken a turn towards the overwrought and the gimmicky, but I still read his blog regularly.
In some cases, the mainstream media have made the switch by hiring on bloggers such as Glenn Greenwald at Salon, Ezra Klein at The American Prospect. The Atlantic, as Garance mentioned, now has a serious "stable of bloggers" like Marc Ambinder, Matt Yglesias, and Andrew Sullivan. DailyKos' Markos Moulitsas is now being hired on to write at Newsweek and soon also at insider Washington paper The Hill.
Ben Smith at the Politico, following the Democratic primary, updates perhaps the most rapidly, posting throughout the day, trying to stay ahead of stories as they break. Just about every mainstream newspaper seems to have an eletion news blog now, like the Washington Post's The Trial, the New York Times' The Caucus, and the Chicago Tribune's The Swamp are just a few. Establishment liberal magazines like the Nation and, of course, the American Prospect, also have long-running blogs. And the trend is extending down into regional and local papers.
In short, blogging has become the answer for newspapers journalists to 24-hour cable news networks. Through the internet, newspaper journalists are able to keep their readers as up-to-date, if not in fact more so, than broadcast journalists. And after all, a blog is far more informative and has far more possibilities and links to more information than a broadcast can ever have.
The danger, of course, is that they fall into the same traps that cable news has: filling the voracious demand for new material by posting rumor, gossip, or fluff.
To my mind, one of the most promising things about the spread is the opportunity to develop a different style of political and intellectual debate. Instead of newspapers operating in relative isolation from one another, bloggers are constantly linking and bouncing ideas off of one another. There's a level of responsiveness and conversation that I find appealing.
But I thought Deborah Newell Tornello gave a touching and beautiful tribute to the potential of blogging in her farewell post on Ezra Klein's blog:
Oscar Wilde said that "journalism is unreadable and literature is not read", but I believe that between the two, there is a little-known middle ground upon which a lucky few can find balanced footing--that it's possible to draw inspiration and even fuel from each discipline. Thus the informative becomes artful; the esoteric, nourishing.
There are, of course, lots of questions for the future. With the rise of the "Mainstream Blogosphere," what happens to the "Establishment Blogosphere" like MyDD and DailyKos? And more particularly, what happens to the fun and loose culture that distinguished the blogosphere in the first place? The spontaneity? Will others continue to found new blogs and launch new efforts? Or will there be ever greater concentration in the hands of a few establishment bloggers?
Stay tuned.