Shafer and the bloggers

Captain's Quarters disagrees about the merit of the Jack Shafer column discussed below.

Shafer Misses The Revolution

The good Captain Ed makes a very strong point but pushes it too far, IMHO.

Shafer likens the advent of the blogosphere with the same kind of fervor for portable video, and in an entertaining but fundamentally flawed analysis, concludes that the changes will be minor and evolutionary. Unfortunately, Shafer misses the one important point in the lesson. The video evolution failed to become a revolution because the technological change focused on production and not distribution. Portable video did indeed free the masses to produce their own material, but CBS, Paramount, and the like still controlled the means of distribution, and in most areas they still do.

The Internet, especially cheap broadband access, changed all of that.

If we think of distribution as a matter of pushing content to the public, he is dead-on. The Internet has dropped those costs dramatically.

However, creating demand-the pull side-remains expensive. Garnering links, building awareness, creating buzz, gaining hits-all of these are vital to success and their cost remains substantial. Nor can they be redefined so that costs=merit.

Powerline and Captain's Quarters represent the best case for the blogging revolution. They are thoughtful blogs that post meaty, analytical pieces. They richly deserve their traffic and high ecosystem rankings. On the other hand, we can't ignore Wonkette-a prefab concoction harvested hits and links with marketing dollars and sex jokes.

The Captain may be right that "the revolution has already been blogged." But it is also true that the blogging revolution is being co-opted.

On another point we agree about the facts but disagree about their implications.

The distribution, not the product, is the revolution -- and bloggers thrive off of their ability to out-pace and out-react the mainstream media, which for the most part remains stuck on the notion of a full-day news cycle.

And

Will this mean the end of the New York Times, as Crichton predicted thirteen years ago? Probably not, but it will mean the end of the full-day news cycle. Those who don't recognize that fact will die a slow death in the fast-paced market for news that the blogosphere demands.

First, I think this pace represents a substantial "cost" of distribution. Maintaining high traffic requires writing a lot and writing fast. Moreover, I think this frenetic environment lowers over-all quality in the blogosphere and creates our own set of biases. (See previous post and the links therein.)

The Junk Yard Blog makes the same point.

It is absolutely nuts, and demonstrates one of the most frustrating things about the blogosphere, which is its tendency toward groupthink. We see a headline and we see who can be the first to post, the first to react and the first to charge, never considering the possibility that we may be charging straight over a cliff.

He is discussing the Maggie Gallagher and James Dobson controversies. But it shows up time and again. For example, it morphed the whole question of the NY Times's and its biases into a vendetta against Howell Raines. Now that Raines is gone, is the Times unbiased? Hardly. It was a liberal, insular paper pre-Raines and it is a liberal, insular paper today. All the anti-Raines blogging did nothing to make the paper better.

Update: Off to OTB's Beltway Traffic Jam.