Blog.
Such an ugly word, is it not? It sounds like a character on Star Trek, or a digestive problem. Is this seriously the best name we can come up with for this new and revolutionary medium? I wish I had a better name for it, but I don't.
We can all learn a little from Bob Marley.
One of my favorite rastaman tunes is "Small Axe," with its insurgent lyrics about taking down a larger and less righteous adversary.
If you are the big tree
We are the small axe
Ready to cut you down (sharp and ready)
To cut you down
Many in the blogosphere would fashion themselves to be that small axe, ready to take down the establishment machine.
Righteous purveyors of justice I am not so sure, but with thousands of jobs being shed from traditional journalism every year, it's no surprise blogs are becoming more important sources of information.
In a fascinating case study of the sometimes murky world bloggers inhabit, one of the great coups of the presidential campaign was scored by a "citizen journalist" covering the democratic primary for the Huffington Post. Mayhill Flower, who was not being paid for her work, had been following Obama during the springtime when she managed to score an invite to the private San Francisco fundraiser where Obama uttered his now infamous comments about "bitter" small town Americans "clinging to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."
Flower, an Obama supporter, was torn over whether or not to make the comment known, sensing the damage it would do to Obama's campaign. But after four days of wrestling with it, and deciding it was her duty as a journalist to do so, she wrote about the comment, with the actual quote buried in a long narrative about the characteristics of rural Pennsylvanians, who she does not see as bitter.
We all know what has happened to those comments since then. I'm writing this on Thursday morning, but I'd bet you a pound of moose jerky that Sarah Palin has something to say about them in the vice presidential debate set to kick off in a few hours.
The great nameless, faceless blogging masses can also make an effective scapegoat. They served this role when McCain used, as a pretext, so-called hateful rumors in the blogosphere about Palin's newest child actually belonging to her daughter. Those uninformed bloggers are wrong, the campaign said, because Palin's daughter is currently five months pregnant with her own child.
Just goes to show the brave new world we are living in. Many have predicted the death of traditional newspapers in this multimedia age. Certainly newspapers don't enjoy the market share they once had, and owning a newspaper is no longer a license to print money (except maybe in Aspen). Staff cutbacks haven't helped this perception either. But the rise of the blogosphere only demonstrates the public's hunger for written news in the vacuum of shrinking newspaper influence. And just because there are no actual standards for blogs, which many a blogger takes as a liberty, doesn't mean there aren't those out there who do hold themselves to high standards. Take for example the Talking Points Memo site, which won a Polk Award for its coverage of the U.S. Attorney firing hearings.
I've never been under the illusion that institutions like the New York Times and the Washington Post are going anywhere, just as the public's desire for quality journalism isn't going anywhere. But there is certainly a gap between the blogosphere and the mainstream media that is only bound to get smaller.
Send your suggestion for a term other than "blog" to curtis@aspendailynews.com.
