In between sound-editing “The Three Little Pigs” and “Little Red Riding Hood” for Storynory, I’ve had a little less time than usual to read “grown-up” books. But I have very much enjoyed, and learned from, “Blog!” by David Kline and Dan Burstein.
Apart from anything, “Blog!” is a great way to travel across the breadth of the blogosphere and familiarise yourself with the leading bloggers. I’ve been blogging since the spring, and during that time, I haven’t been come across half the bloggers interviewed for “Blog!” I suppose a good old fashioned book is still better organised and more convenient to use than the net. Here you can read interviews with Adam Curry, Jonathan Schwartz, Jeff Jarvis, Markos Moulitas Zuniga, Roger L. Simon, Andrew Sullivan, and many, many more. The introductions to the sections and chapters are very perceptive and intelligent.
The most enjoyable interview is with “Wonkette“, the “failed” journalist, Ana Marie Cox, who tells us that she could not hold down a job in journalism. She still earns about as much as a journalist just graduated, but she has great perks writing political gossip that’s not edited. There’s no need to persuade a po-faced editor that her story is amusing. And it’s nice to have people suck up to her, and to meet all the Washington DC types who tell her who is having sex with whom.
Wonkette’s boss, blog entrepreneur, Nick Denton, maintains in his interview for “Blog!” that journalists don’t often make good bloggers. I can see that this is true in the UK, but I suspect that it is even more true in the US .
Here in Britain, surveys have shown for years that journalists are held in huge disregard by the public. We are way down there with drug pushers and politicians. And that’s the way it should be. We are not allowed to take ourselves too seriously. We have long looked with envy at the high salaries and high regard commanded by our fellow hacks in the Land of the First Amendment and the Pulitzer Prize. But all that esteem has been bad for American journalists. They have disappeared up their own behinds, to use a British phrase.
It wasn’t always the case. If you go back to the 1920s and 1930s, American journalism led the world in racy, amusing, gossipy, style.
If I may divert a little bit from “Blog!”, I will quote a little passage from the weekly movie mag, PhotoPlay, from 1927 (I gathered it for another project I was working on earlier this year).
“When in doubt- commit matrimony.
This ancient and honourable pastime is meeting with increasing popularity in motion–picture circles; and when our hard-working little stars are in need of recreation, along with their tennis rackets, high powered racers, and California bungalows, likely as not they annex unto themselves husbands and not necessarily someone else’s. As a matter of fact, other people’s husbands are becoming a bit passé in the film set. It is considered far more recherché these days to import a brand new model, and since Gloria Swanson ventured so successfully into the aristocracy, princess of the blood are preferred.”
Impoverished nobility, fresh from the bloodstained palaces of Europe, is selling its family portraits and packing its pedigrees overseas, no longer in the hope of acquiring an American heiress but an American star….”
And so on, dripping with irony and above all IRREVERENCE. The passage is not untypical. Much of American journalism of the era was just like Wonkette is now, and even the serious papers were not afraid to slip into the vernacular. Nowadays, the media pays enormous RESPECT to politicians and movie stars, and even more to movies stars who are also politicians. It’s happening here too in the UK with magazines like Hello! and OK! leading the way, and influencing the daily newspapers, but on the whole, British hacks don’t creep to big names, at least, not all the time.
So I think it’s understandable why blogs have taken off in such a big way in the United States where a gaping void needed to be filled. People enjoy lively, bold, opinionated, biased, characterful, amusing, writing - and blogs give it to them. As is clear from this book, Political blogs in the USA are just huge. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the former solider who set up the DailyKos, was amazed when his blog had 100 readers a day. Now he has around 500,000 per day, and he makes a reported $48,000 per month from advertising (he admits to five figures per month).
“Blog!” is particularly good on the impact of blogging on US media and politics, but it does not just limit its horizons to America . There’s a fascinating interview with Rebecca MacKinnon, the former CNN reporter turned blogger, who now studies the impact of blogging on North Korea, China, and other Asian countries, where speech is not as free as it might be. The book begins in the French Dordogne, looking at prehistoric cave paintings (the first blogs) but after that Europe doesn’t get much of a look-in. Blogging is big in France, Italy, and Spain. I too don’t know much about what’s happening there. I keep meaning to find out more.
“Blog!” has set me thinking about a number of topics, and I expect to post some more “Blog!” inspired entries soon.
By the way, I came across this book because one its authors, David Kline, commented here. His own blog, Blog Revolt, is well worth following.
My Sony Hi-MD (mini disc) kicked the bucket somewhat prematurely. It chews and chews on a disc without engaging. I suppose the mechanism got mangled on one of my trans-Atlantic flights. I had to drag myself into the modern recording age and invest 300 quid in a flash recorder, AND stump up another 25 for an SD memory card. And do you know what? It was worth it.
Looks like our children’s podcast site, 
