Journojism: Blog Envy
There’s been a bit of a flap of late about the rise to prominence of a handful of British bloggers. Some in the old school media worlds have had their ivory towers, not to mention their future career prospects and inflated salaries, shaken by the thought that there are legions of web-savvy people out there willing to put intelligent, well-researched articles in the public domain for nothing.
An article in the Guardian this week said there are nearly seven million bloggers in the UK. That’s one in four Internet users and one in nine of the entire population. Some of the cream (and some of the shit, naturally) is starting to float and is getting noticed in wider circles, challenging the mainstream media particularly in the area of political commentary.
The Independent seems to be leading the charge in the counter-insurgency against blogging. Three of its columnists have got stuck in this month, two of them this week alone. Women don’t blog because they ‘tend to be less confident than men that the rest of the world wants the benefit of [their] opinion,’ said Mary Dejevsky deftly glossing over the fact that British newspaper columns are bursting with women, including a certain Mary Dejevsky, confident that the world *does* want the benefits of their opinion.
‘Blogs are so uncool. If David Milliband’s doing one, and the Chief Constable of North Wales, then it’s not something that rings my bells,’ opined Janet Street-Porter last Sunday. As Vice President of the Ramblers Association, and erstwhile contestant of ‘I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here’ and ‘Call me a Cabbie’, a reality-TV show where – stand by for excitement – she learned to drive a taxi, she knows all about what rings bells, quite clearly. Blogs ‘are the verbal diarrhoea of the under-educated and banal,’ she sneered before rounding off her column with a paean to the joys of porridge. (Really.) What qualifies Street-Porter to be a journalist herself is unclear. Her website says she studied architecture which surely makes her ‘under-educated’ for a job in the media.
On Monday Yasmin Alibhai-Brown asked: ‘Where do blog writers and surfers find the time? When do they do the washing, cooking, eating, talking, cuddling, story reading to the kids? Do they never help with the school homework, go to the theatre, make love, read books, talk to friends, entertain?’ Presumably, Yasmin, they find the time in the same place you do, between your writing for the Independent, being a Senior Researcher at the Foreign Policy Centre, authoring numerous books and pamphlets, producing reports for the Institute of Public Policy Research, and never being off endless speak-your-brains slots on News 24. And frankly, we don’t want to know if you have the time to make love or not.
Is it coincidence that it’s three women columnists who’ve chosen to speak out? Is it the nature of the pundit industry that women columnists feel less secure in their positions in a still largely male-dominated industry? They do seem to come in for the worst of the stick from bloggers, it’s true. Some of the female writers over at the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ überblog have complained about the attention they’ve received at the hands of bloggers commenting on their articles. ‘What do you do all day… that you have time to spend your life on this site?’ asked Polly Toynbee, echoing Alibhai-Brown. Toynbee in particular seems to have attracted a following of bloggers willing to perform meticulous post mortems on her every utterance. Still, if her rumoured huge salary doesn’t help, she should maybe think of doing something else. Such scrutiny can’t be easy though and, having received an unforgivable email from a reader, saying, ‘Nobody would miss you for 5 seconds if you were dead like your despicable shitball husband. I should like to see you in a cancer ward screaming with pain and vomiting blood,’ Toynbee should be congratulated for her admirable restraint when the rest of us would have been on the phone to the police.
So why the fuss? Street-Porter gives it away when she says that, with its ‘Comment is Free’, ‘The Guardian seems, in a perverse way, to be saying that amateurs are the future in publishing – and that can’t be good for business.’ Armies of intelligent writers who do a better job at a fraction of the cost are gaining on Janet and they didn’t have to do all that tedious slog of producing offal like ‘The Full Wax’ and ‘L!ve TV’ to do it. It’s sour grapes mixed with a little fear. She’s feebly trying to strangle the blogging baby at birth in case it grows up and overthrows her.
‘And please don’t tell me this is democratising communication. Mass blogging may indeed be giving access to Everyman, but is he always worth listening to?’ said Alibhai-Brown, completely wrong on both counts. Notice the patronising ‘Everyman’ as Yasmin sets herself above the herd. Blogging most definitely *is* democratising communication. It allows anybody to publish on the Internet for free. If they’re popular enough, with the use of Internet ads, they can even make a few quid if they choose to. As to whether our plucky Everyman is worth listening to, well, you could say that about anything. Like turning the page on a dull, whining newspaper columnist, another blog is only a click away. Quality will out, which is why we’re now seeing some bloggers writing books and newspaper columns (look out, Yasmin!), and appearing on television.
‘When one or two bloggers inexplicably find fame, yet another wave joins the industry,’ she said. One of the blogs that has hit the big time recently is the one belonging to the pseudonymous political gossip-monger Guido Fawkes. It’s read by more people than the Labour and Conservative parties’ websites combined apparently. Which is a bit like saying Harry Potter is read by more people than ‘Pipefitter’s Monthly’ but never mind. We know Fawkes’ blog is read by more people than the Labour and Conservative parties’ websites combined because he likes to tell his readers so. All the time. It’s the blogging equivalent of bragging about the size of your cock. The News of the World is Britain’s biggest selling newspaper but that doesn’t make it the best.
A lot of Fawkes’ popularity stems from the fact he recently named the female Labour MP with whom John Prescott is rumoured to have had an affair – an outing that the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson described as bloggers ‘attempting to make the political weather’ (Fawkes had accused Robinson of burying Prescott’s bad news, which rankled with the BBC man somewhat). Fawkes promises further revelations but so far, between low-grade gossip about ‘wonks’, ‘totty’ and Mark Oaten, nothing else has appeared.
Of course, massively and mysteriously popular as Guido Fawkes is, he’s also wildly unrepresentative of the quality that can be found if you take a short walk across blogland. It’s as if Pot Noodle has been voted Britain’s favourite food. Most journalists think blogs like this are the yardstick because they’re too lazy or stupid to spend time finding the quality. Street-Porter and Alibhai-Brown whine because they’ve never read Europhobia, Bloggerheads, Robert Sharp, The Sharpener or Pigdogfucker. Dejevsky can moan about a gender gap in blogging because she’s ignorant of the likes of Pandemian, Rachel North or the Gendergeeks (to name but three in the vast pantheon of female bloggers).
On the current crisis in Lebanon, for example, the writers of Smokewriting and Blood and Treasure have written well-researched, thoughtful and darkly humorous articles that shame most of the guff coming out of the mainstream. All of the bloggers mentioned here are producing pieces of a quality that Janet Street-Porter, staring into her porridge bowl, can only dream of writing. Which is damning them with faint praise, admittedly, considering there are chimps with a better grasp of English than Janet.
The major aspect of blogging that gets overlooked by most people, particularly the ‘what do you want to do *that* for?’ wing of the punditocracy, and even bloggers themselves, is what you have here is millions of people *writing for pleasure*. Thinking, learning, ordering their thoughts. How is that a bad thing? Nearly all of them are never going to attain the heights to which Janet’s ruminations on breakfast cereals have elevated her, more’s the pity, but they’re enjoying themselves in the meantime, making connections and, in some cases, lasting friendships (’I don’t crave a ‘dialogue’ with you,’ said Street-Porter of blogging’s interactive aspect on Sunday. Her loss and our gain, we hope you’ll agree). Plus, bloggers (by doing their own thing) and their readers (by reading something fresh and unconstrained by the interests of advertisers) are taking a break from, and in some cases rejecting completely, the mainstream media whose sole purpose in life these days is to be paid mountains of cash to tell people what and how to think.
Which leaves the writers of a weekly satirical email comment sheet where, exactly? Fucking bloggers, coming over here, taking our jobs…
(First published in this week’s The Friday Thing.)
Posted on July 28th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
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Irony failure:
1) Ms A-B and Ms Street-Porter both write for the Independent – the country’s least read major daily, saved only by the deep pockets and vanity of its publisher to have a title in the UK. Without old Tony O’Reilly, both would have to seek avenues elsewhere, and I don’t think they’ll be inviting Ms Porter onto Dateline London anytime soon. Would they be whining if they weren’t well paid Fleet Street columnists and were forced to blog for draw attention to themselves, hmm?
2) Name one time when you’ve been enlightened by a column by Janet Street-Porter. Name one you actually remember. Are you struggling?
That’s because she’s shit.
Aren’t you sweet for linking? But pretty much everything I’ve written for the last six months or more (blog-wise, at least) has been rubbish. A sore lack of inspiration caused by the brain-addling tedium of the news being the same ALL THE SODDING TIME. Civil liberties, ID cards, terrorism, the Middle East on the brink of all-out collapse (which has been the case for at least five decades, surely?), Labour cock-ups, corruption, sex scandals, the government formulating policy based on tabloid reports while ignoring genuine concerns and problems, the Home Secretary being a scarily authoritarian bastard, blah blah blah pissing blah…
It actually makes me feel sorry for the professional columnists. I appear to have run out of enthusiasm after a mere two years of churning out daily opinions on the topics of the day – most of the newspaper lot have been doing it for decades. No wonder they end up talking about bland breakfast fodder.
It actually makes me feel sorry for the professional columnists.
I don’t. I’m sure their fat salaries are a slight compensation.
I’m a big fan of ‘if you’ve nothing to say, shut up’, which is why this place has been pretty quieter. Most of these columnists monkeys could afford to take a month off and try and find a fresh angle. But nooooo, they just stick with tthe interminable cycle of insulting people’s intelligence and getting paid for it.
In fact, to be honest, I don’t think the above piece is angry enough. I may plough this furrow again before long.
One reason, I suspect, that the Indy’s columnists are so aerated about bloggers may be that you actually have to pay to read most of the Indy’s columnists online.
I can’t really imagine that many people do shell out £1 a time to read Janet Street-Porter and the rest; it must be rather dispiriting for them to contemplate how they’re doing in the face of all this free competition and it may also raise all manner of worrying thoughts in their minds about their continuing employment. I mean, at some point Tony O’Reilly’s likely to ask if he’s getting value for money, isn’t he?
I can’t really imagine that many people do shell out £1 a time to read Janet Street-Porter.
I did. I paid for all three articles mentioned above. Three quid in the toilet. I’m still boiling.
One of the reasons the Guardian’s online presence is so successful is surely because its content is free, bloggers link to it and drive traffic to the site making it attractive to advertisers.
Surely getting advertisers on board is a better model than hoping a few people will pay a pound a pop. The convoluted purchasing system must put most punters off for starters. The certainly haven’t cracked the micropayments-for-copy model.
Agree completely I’d read every column because I buy the Indy daily. But the website is godawful, I’mhalf tempted to google bomb it as piss-poor website just because.
My blogging output is suffering recently; the heat, no inspiration and same shit/different day syndrome is getting to me.
Guardian Unlimited makes a profit (a reasonable one I’m told). I doubt Indy does (and half the content is available free from the Belfast Telegraph anyway). Pluss, their comment section seems to have gone downhill recently. Ah well.
Not enough vitriol, but otoh, it’s a good one to point the daft columnists at because it’s reasonably polite and says nasty things about Guido, who is a little up himself recently.
If folks are for some reason unwilling to pay £1 a time to read about what Janet Street-Porter had for breakfast, they might be interested to know that, apparently, most English libraries (not sure about other parts of the UK) offer free online access to most newspapers, including the Indy (and a load of other subscription reference sources) from your own pc. Mine (Warwickshire) certainly does.
To be fair on Guido, I’m fairly convinced that he’s fully aware that most of his stuff is tabloid shite, and that that is the intention. He’s not trying to be the next Littlejohn, let alone the next Mencken, merely a UK political version of Confidential.
At that, he’s been very successful – but for those of us who ARE vaguely keen on being the next Mencken, Orwell or whatever it is admittedly a tad annoying that the mainstream media powers that be can’t tell that it is possible to have different approaches to the same subject matter in a similar format.
“Blogs are shit” will continue to be the perennial cry for a while yet, as they genuinely can’t see that “books are shit” based on a quick skim through The Da Vinci Code would be an equally stupid conclusion. Then again, it’s not like newspaper columnists are PAID to think, analyse and form justifiable opinions, is it?
To be fair, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was slagging off bloggers who’d posted lies about her, which other people were then confronting her with as fact.
I have noticed that a lot of people who see everything in the MSM as lies and propaganda are happy to believe stuff they read on a blog – the reason being that the blogger is saying something they want to hear.
>I’m a big fan of ‘if you’ve nothing to say, shut up’
That’s ok if you’re doing it as a hobby. If I told my editor: “I’ve nothing to say this week, so fill the space with something else” it wouldn’t go down so well.
There are a lot of columnists in the nationals I don’t like. And I am massively jealous of their salaries. But I think the resentment comes from professionals not appreciating the world and his dog thinking they can do better for free. If I went to your boss and offered to do your job for a week for no pay, wouldn’t you feel miffed, or threatened?
Nosemonkey:
To be fair on Guido, I’m fairly convinced that he’s fully aware that most of his stuff is tabloid shite…
I think you’re being generous rather than fair, most of his stuff’s not even that interesting. His big scoop this week seems to be a New Labour press release, newsworthy because it had got a constituency’s name wrong.
Couple that with yet more ‘jokes’ about Mark Oaten (’Let’s face it Oaten was up shit creek!!!’ and ‘As always Oaten wanted to get the dumping in first!!!’ brayed the sophisticates in the comments) and it makes you realise that pleasing that amount of people is easier than we thought. We’re trying too hard. Poo poo, cacka. Totty. See? I’ve probably put a couple of thousand on the visitor counter already.
Mandy:
If I told my editor: “I’ve nothing to say this week, so fill the space with something else” it wouldn’t go down so well.
So just fob the paying customer off with tired, uninspired claptrap, a la Street-Porter, yeah? Betrays a certain contempt for readers, I’d say. It could be construed as ‘any old shit will do’. Not an attitude you’d accept from many other walks of life, is it? Yasmin and Janet are rich, and apparently popular, enough to bugger off for a bit and come back when they’ve found something else to say.
I have noticed that a lot of people who see everything in the MSM as lies and propaganda are happy to believe stuff they read on a blog – the reason being that the blogger is saying something they want to hear.
Well that makes them stupid and unquestioning doesn’t it? The advantage of the comments sections of blogs is that you can engage in a proper dialogue. It allows them to directly challenge what’s been said. That’s something Alibhai-Brown can’t or won’t do. She’d rather look down her nose at the ‘Everyman’, clueless as to why they’re pissed off or questioning her credentials to do what she does. She’d needs to get over herself – people don’t want to unquestioningly digest her handed-down-from-on-high thoughts any more. And, I’m not unsympathetic to some of the flak she has but, as most bloggers learn very quickly, she should realise she’s safe and justified in ignoring the dickheads.
I wasn’t advocating usurping the commentariat with people who’ll do it for nothing. I don’t know of any blogger who’s been asked to write for a newspaper who’s doing it for free. That’s not what it’s about. Who in their right mind wants to do that?
All I’m saying is that there are better writers out there and if editors were truly interested in quality and not churning out facile crap just because Janet Street-Porter wrote it, the state of journalism would be a little bit better and those bloggers I listed would be getting paid instead of doing it for love.
Due to the huge barriers to entry, making it big in journalism is almost impossible these days – in some areas it’s bordering on a closed shop. Without contacts, a daddy in the business or a rich daddy who’ll pay your way through the unpaid internships where you can make those contact, it’s a big struggle. On the slim chance one or two good bloggers sneak in the back door I’m sure Yasmin and Janet won’t starve.
‘I have noticed that a lot of people who see everything in the MSM as lies and propaganda are happy to believe stuff they read on a blog – the reason being that the blogger is saying something they want to hear.’
Hardly unique to blogs, is it? As Walter Bagehot put it (in the National Review, July 1856, apparently), ‘The purchaser [of a newspaper] desires an article which he can appreciate at sight; which he can lay down and say, “An excellent article, very excellent; exactly my own sentiments”‘.
Mandy: To be fair, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was slagging off bloggers who’d posted lies about her, which other people were then confronting her with as fact.
The problem is, as Dave shows, we can’t find any evidence of any bloggers writing the things she accuses, let alone any of the more read blogs. She seems to be the victim of a runour doing the rounds, and to have therefore decided it must be those nasty bloggers.
People who believe everything they read on blogs are as stupid as those who believe everything in the Sun or the Mail. We know such people exist, but that doesn’t mean you should write off all newspapers become some of the readers of some of the papers are a bit gullible. Same applies to blogs. Or Private Eye, for that matter.
>We know such people exist, but that doesn’t mean you should write off all newspapers
Whose writing off all anything? I said there are people who reject the MSM as biased but then believe whatever they read on blogs. It was an observation, is all.
>Then again, it’s not like newspaper columnists are PAID to think, analyse and form justifiable opinions, is it?
Now THAT is writing off something. It’s a sweeping generalisation and just the sort of comment that leads columnists to hit back – with generalisations about bloggers.
I’m not going to defend JSP and her porridge. And if you want to start a campaign against the likes of Rebecca Tyrell, who only ever writes about what her husband did/said/watched on telly, I’ll be first in the queue. But if bloggers slag off people in the MSM (which many do, endlessly), they shouldn’t be surprised if some of them respond in kind.
“I don’t know of any blogger who’s been asked to write for a newspaper who’s doing it for free.”
Me. Once. 1200 words for The Indy. Quid pro quo was that they would pimp the anthology (the one you are doing this year Justin). They didn’t pimp it and they didn’t pay me. Beware!
Then again, one of their other writers on blogs called Instapundit “the American left wing blogger”.