Columbia Journalism Review on blogging

The Columbia Journalism Review published an excellent piece by Matt Welch on the blogging revolution. He starts out by explaining:

This February, I attended my first Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference, in the great media incubator of San Francisco. [...N]ever in my life have I seen a more conformist gathering of journalists.

All the newspapers looked the same — same format, same fonts, same columns complaining about the local daily, same sex advice, ame five-thousand-word hole for the cover story. The people were largely the same, too: all but maybe 2 percent of the city-slicker journalists in attendance were white; the vast majority were either Boomer hippies or Gen X slackers. Several asked me the exact same question with the same suspicious looks on their faces: "So . . . what's your alternative experience?"

[...] At the bar, I started a discussion about what specific attributes qualified these papers, and the forty-seven-year-old publishing genre that spawned them, to continue meriting the adjective "alternative." Alternative to what? To the straight-laced "objectivity" d pyramid-style writing of daily newspapers? New Journalists and other narrative storytellers crashed those gates long ago. Alternative to society's oppressive intolerance toward deviant behavior? Tell it to the Osbournes, as they watch Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Something to do with corporate ownership? Not unless "alternative" no longer applies to Village Voice Media (owned in part by Goldman Sachs) or the New Times chain (which has been involved in some brutal acquisition and liquidation deals). Someone at the table lamely offered up "a sense of community," but Fox News could easily clear that particular bar.

No, it must have something to do with political slant — or, to be technically accurate, political correctness. Richard Karpel, the AAN executive director, joined the conversation, so I put him on the spot: Of all the weeklies his organization had rejected for membership on political grounds, which one was the best editorially? The Independent Florida Sun, he replied. Good-looking paper, some sharp writing but, well, it was just too friendly toward the church. "And if there's anything we all agree on," Karpel said with a smile, "it's that we're antichurch."

I assumed he was joking — that couldn't be all we have left from the legacy of Norman Mailer, Art Kunkin, Paul Krassner, and my other childhood heroes, could it? Then later I looked up the AAN's Web site to read the admission committee's rejection notes for the Florida Sun (which was excluded by a vote of 9-2). "The right-wing church columnist has no place in AAN," explained one judge. "All the God-and-flag shit disturbs me," wrote another. "Weirdly right-wing," chimed a third.

The original alternative papers were not at all this politically monochromatic [...] The dull pieties of official progressivism is one of many attributes that show how modern alt weeklies have strayed from what made them alternative in the first place. The papers once embraced amateur writers; now they are firmly established in the journalistic pecking order, with the salaries and professional standards to match. They once championed the slogan "never trust anyone over thirty"; now their average reader is over forty and aging fast. They have become so ubiquitous in cities over a certain size, during decades when so many other new media formats have sprung up (cable television, newsletters, talk radio, business journals, Web sites), that the very notion that they represent a crucial "alternative" to a monolithic journalism establishment now strains credulity.

But there still exists a publishing format that manages to embody all these lost qualities, and more — the Weblog.

He goes on to explain about the hows and whys of weblogging and offers this trenchant observation:

or lazy columnists and defensive gatekeepers, it can seem as if the hounds from a mediocre hell have been unleashed. But for curious professionals, it is a marvelous opportunity and entertaining spectacle; they discover what the audience finds important and encounter specialists who can rip apart the work of many a generalist. [J]ournalists finally have something approaching real peer review, in all its brutality. If they truly value the scientific method, they should rejoice. Blogs can bring a collective intelligence to bear on a question.

Pre-publication peer reviewing is practiced by all scientific journals worthy of the name. A paper submitted for publication is sent out by the editor to (usually two) specialists, who anonymously review the paper in detail and decide one of the following: (a) the paper is publishable as is; (b) the paper is publishable, with some minor changes; (c) the paper may be publishable after major changes but should be re-reviewed in revised form; (d) the paper may be publishable in another journal; (e) the paper should not be published at all. The process has its occasional failings but by and large has served the scientific community well.

What makes it intrinsically unsuitable to news media is its sheer turnaround time. Even 'rapid communication' typescientific journals have turnaround times measured in weeks; three to six months is common for first-line established journals, even in the days of e-submission, e-reviewing, and web editions. The alternative is "post-publication peer reviewing", as practiced in the blogosphere at its best.

Welch does acknowledge that 90% of all news-related blogs may be crud. But that's of course just [SF writer Theodore] Sturgeon's Law in action: "90% of all SF is crap. That's because 90% of everything is crap."