Scott Rosen­berg sketches his vision of blogosphere’s impact on our culture

Scott Rosen­berg, co-founder and long­time man­ag­ing edi­tor of Salon — and a long­time friend — has a new book out, fol­low­ing Dream­ing in Code, called Say Every­thing: How Blog­ging Began, What It’s Becom­ing, and Why It Mat­ters (Crown Pub­lish­ing Group). It’s a well-written, well-researched, worth­while read about blog­ging, its ori­gins, import and where it’s going. He took part this week in a Q&A about blogging’s impact on pub­lish­ing, jour­nal­ism and our cul­ture at large.

1Blog­ging is no longer the shiny new toy, and the cool kids are mov­ing on to social net­works and micro-blogging ser­vices like Twit­ter. Tell us why you think blogs have a vibrant future.

SR: Blogs have a great future because the Web has a great future, and blogs are the Web’s sin­gle most impor­tant native form. The “cool kids” did their part for blog­ging by embrac­ing it in the early days and help­ing it evolve into the mature phe­nom­e­non that it is today. That’s their role; they’re doing the same thing with Twit­ter et al. now. But their wan­ing enthu­si­asm means very lit­tle to a form that we can now see is the sin­gle most use­ful vehi­cle for self-expression online. Once mil­lions take up some activ­ity, you really don’t need the cool kids anymore.

2You’ve been research­ing and writ­ing your book for some time. What was the sin­gle biggest sur­prise you came across?

SR: I was sur­prised by how much of every­thing that would come later was pre­fig­ured by the expe­ri­ences of the ear­li­est blog­gers whose tales are con­tained in Say Every­thing’s first sec­tion. Any sort of issue that might come up and hit you in the head as a blog­ger — with the excep­tion of adver­tis­ing– and money-related mat­ters — turns out to be some­thing these peo­ple faced.

3Name a few blog­gers who aren’t house­hold names but whose blogs
enrich the pub­lic discourse.

SR: I’m not try­ing to be dif­fi­cult, but I have to ask, which blog­gers are house­hold names? Whose house, exactly, are we liv­ing in? Is Anil Dash a house­hold name? He’s been writ­ing some amaz­ing stuff lately. Is Mer­lin Mann a house­hold name? Nate Sil­ver? Cer­tainly these are all “well known blog­gers,” in cer­tain spheres, but none of them really rises to the level of name-recognition of any second-string actor.

I think I have to con­tinue being dif­fi­cult and chal­lenge the sec­ond part of the ques­tion, too. “Enrich­ing the pub­lic dis­course” makes it sound like “the pub­lic dis­course” is mono­lithic. There are a mil­lion “pub­lic dis­courses” out there, and most blog­gers of any level of ambi­tion are con­tribut­ing to at least one of them. I may not be per­son­ally inter­ested in the obses­sions of a quilt­ing blog­ger or a base­ball geek, but they are now par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pub­lic dis­course that mat­ters to them.

[JD: This is worth dis­cussing more deeply over a beer some time. While I value all the knit­ting blog­gers, sports blog­gers and mommy blog­gers out there, we do need vibrant dis­cus­sions in the blo­gos­phere around pub­lic pol­icy issues, espe­cially with the increas­ing irrel­e­vance of many news­pa­pers and other tra­di­tional media voices. We find some of this with Josh Marshall’s Talk­ing Points Memo, Pro Pub­lica, the Politico, Huff­in­g­ton Post, Daily Kos, Power Line and else­where, but we need many more blogs, and blog­gers, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pub­lic dis­course about their com­mu­ni­ties and their nation.]

4My per­cep­tion is that few of us are blog­ging about con­fer­ences or live events any­more — it’s eas­ier to Tweet. But that makes it harder for read­ers to get a con­tex­tual under­stand­ing of what they missed when it comes over in micro-chunks. What’s your impression?

SR: Twitter’s a more effi­cient chan­nel for “live blog­ging” an event, in a lot of ways, than a tool like Word­press or Mov­able Type, so it’s no sur­prise we’re using it for that. Blog posts are bet­ter for pro­vid­ing the con­text. It would be a shame for the per­son tweet­ing a live event to think, gee, my job is done once the Twit­ter stream ends, and never offer that con­text. But maybe now we’re more likely to divide this sort of cov­er­age, let­ting the live-streamers and reflec­tive posters each do what they do best. The only thing that wor­ries me here is that we don’t yet really know how well a Tweet will serve as a ref­er­ence point in the future (as I wrote a lit­tle while back). Blog posts have known per­sis­tence and long-term dis­cov­er­abil­ity. It would be a shame to lose the his­tor­i­cal record we are cre­at­ing with Twitter.

5How did you use your blog dur­ing your research? Was it a key tool
in uncov­er­ing sources or anecdotes?

SR: Not really. When I’m writ­ing a book I find it really hard to blog at any kind of a reg­u­lar pace. And the nature of this mate­r­ial was such that the chal­lenge lay less in “uncov­er­ing” addi­tional mate­r­ial than in fig­ur­ing out how to define the story — really, decid­ing what to leave out. And of course I ended up leav­ing out tons of impor­tant and fas­ci­nat­ing stuff. But the most impor­tant tool was talk­ing to peo­ple. I con­ducted more than 100 inter­views for Say Every­thing; with more time I could eas­ily have done 100 more.

6How do you think blog­ging is impact­ing jour­nal­ism, both from the
out­side and inside news­rooms, ow that many news orga­ni­za­tions have jour­nal­ists who blog?

SR: I wish I could say that the now-ancient “Jour­nal­ists vs. Blog­gers” con­flict was behind us. But sadly its pat­terns per­sist. Old-line media orga­ni­za­tions have now widely embraced the for­mat of blog­ging for their web efforts. But much of news­room cul­ture remains defi­antly opposed (or stub­bornly resis­tant) to some of the basic prac­tices of the blog­ging world. Aggre­ga­tion and link­ing are as nat­ural to blog­gers as breath­ing; but, as the AP’s recent ini­tia­tives and the flurry of debate around the Wash­ing­ton Post/Gawker sto­ries this past week both demon­strate, some sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the tra­di­tional press has still not come to terms with how the Web works.

As the busi­ness model for much of the tra­di­tional media con­tin­ues to decay, it will be impor­tant to try to limit the dam­age the fad­ing incum­bents can wreak on the free flow of infor­ma­tion and links that blog­ging thrives on.

7How do you see mul­ti­me­dia and video tak­ing blogs in new
direc­tions in the next few years? And a decade from now, do you think text blog­ging will look pretty sim­i­lar to what it looks like today? What’s the long-term impact of the blog­ging rev­o­lu­tion on pub­lish­ing and on our culture?

SR: Really, my answer to that giant ques­tion takes up the final hun­dred pages or so of Say Every­thing. I do think text blog­ging as a form is now mature and likely to change less than peo­ple think. The
rapid evo­lu­tion is still tak­ing place in fil­ter­ing mech­a­nisms and shar­ing tools — how we orga­nize and select, how we fish items out of the river.

###

Thanks, Scott, for tak­ing time out and explor­ing these issues. Read­ers can find Say Every­thing at:
• Ama­zon
• BN
• Inde­pen­dent book­store through IndieBound
and brick-and-mortar book­stores every­where.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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