Reports on the Death of Blogs Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

I've been having a lengthy email exchange with David Swindle and Michael van der Galiën regarding my post the other day, "The Death of Collaboration in the Independent Blogosphere." David's the associate editor at PJ Media and Michael's a new media professional with longtime experience in the conservative blogosphere.

My essay argued that "We've still got lots of independent bloggers out there doing what the mainstream press refuses to do." I recognized the increasing professionalization of the conservatives 'sphere but indicated that blogs will continue to play the key role in alternative media and government accountability going forward. Here's how David responded:

I think there's a big intellectual divide between "bloggers" and "new media professionals." Bloggers are just hung up on the medium of blogging (a medium that is now more than 15 years old and pretty ancient.) New media professionals are people who make their living by exploring and developing new forms of media. I am a partisan of the latter temperament. Blogging is just a means to an end. It shouldn't be an end in and of itself which it is for the kinds of "independent" bloggers who are complaining now about how nobody wants to work with them and link to them anymore. (Not talking about you with that comment, Donald.) New Media professionals should be more interested in finding and developing the next media formats (right now I'm interested in e-books and apps). Preserving the blogosphere as it was in 2002 in like wanting to preserve the newspaper as a format. Time to move on to the next medium and stop fetishizing blogs and "the blogosphere."

I agreed with David for the most post, although I suggested that for all the talk of these "new media professionals" it continues to be bloggers who're among the most well-known alternative media personalities shaping the direction of traditional news reporting. Folks like Michelle Malkin, Ace of Spades HQ, and the Power Line crew are prominent examples. David and I went around a bit more then Michael chimed in:

Listen folks, there are hobbyists - people who run blogs - and there are professionals - people who work for new media organisations. The difference between all too often isn't passion, but strategy, approach, and the time they're taking for it.

As for 'blogging' as in blogging, that's - professionally - more or less dead. It's about generating news yourself, offering different kinds of 'news' (sport, culture, political, etc.), in different ways (Internet TV, written, short written, long written, apps, mobile, normal on the Net, podcasts).

If you're making a living off of this - as I do, and David does - it isn't 'blogging' anymore, it's being a member of the new media.

We all went around for a number of iterations after that. David and Michael pressed further on the "new media professionals" while I continued to hammer the vitality of blogs as watchdogs on the mainstream press.

I don't make a lot of money so I resist the "new media professional title." still, I've been blogging at a number of top conservative blogs for awhile and continue to publish occasionally at PJ Media. When Rick Moran first recruited me to PJ Media in 2008 he mentioned that I was, like him, one of the last "long form bloggers," so even at that time, 5 years ago, the nature of the form was changing.

Change is the theme Andrew "RAWMUSCLEGLUTES" Sullivan stressed in a blog post on the topic earlier this week, "The Death of Blogs? or of Magazines?":

Of course, blogs have evolved – and this one clearly has from its early days. What began as one person being mean to Maureen Dowd around 12.30 am every night is now an organism in which my colleagues and I try to construct both a personal and yet also diverse conversation in real time. But that doesn’t mean the individual blogger – small or large – is disappearing. Our entire model requires, as it did from the get-go, links to other sites and blogs – and we have not detected a shortage.

One reason we have had to grow and evolve – and this started as far back as 2003 – is that the web conversation has grown exponentially since this blog started (when Bill Clinton was president). Yes, many bloggers now get employed by more general sites, or move on to more complex forms (think of Nate Silver, a lone blogger when the Dish first championed his work and now part of an informational eco-system). But every page on the web is equally accessible as every other page. Blogs will never die – but they might form a smaller part of a much larger online eco-system of discourse.

My own view is that one particular form of journalism is actually dying because of this technological shift – and it’s magazines, not blogs. When every page in a magazine can be detached from the others, when readers rarely absorb a coherent assemblage of writers in a bound paper publication, but pick and choose whom to read online where individual stories and posts overwhelm any single collective form of content, the magazine as we have long known it is effectively over.

There's more at the link.

Sullivan is of course one of the premiere (ancient) bloggers who started fifteen years ago. He concludes by arguing that blogs have now evolved into one patch of a larger patchwork of digital forms that constitute a larger presence of web content.

For me, It's been seven years with blogs and I'll keep plugging away like a dinosaur, as long as folks are interested enough to read and link what I have to say.

And returning back to the original theme of collaborative blogging, here's TrogloPundit, "In the spirit of keeping all this blog collaboration going, I shall now coin a new word..."

I'll have more later...

Hat tip to Mark Twain on the title, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."