An Interesting Look Back at Blogging Over 10 Years Ago

From Dave Weinberger, "What Blogging Was":

I was among the 30 bloggers given press credentials at the 2004 ... Democratic National Convention — which was seen as a milestone in the course of blogging’s short history — and attended the press conference for bloggers put on by the DNC. Among the people they brought forward (including not-yet-Senator Obama) was Walter Mears, a veteran and Pulitzer-winning journalist, who had just started a political blog for the Associated Press. I asked who he was going to vote for, but he demurred because then how could we trust his writing? I replied something like, “Then how will we trust your blog?” Transparency is the new objectivity, or so I’ve been told.

It is still the case that for the prototypical blog, it’d be weird not to know where the blogger stands on the issues she’s writing about. On the other hand, in this era of paid content, I personally think it’s especially incumbent on bloggers to be highly explicit not only about where they are starting from, but who (if anyone) is paying the bills. (Here’s my disclosure statement.)

I picked this quote because I like that discussion of ideological perspective. Frankly, transparency should be the norm for everyone in the business of transmitting information. I'm reading Thomas Patterson's latest book, Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism, and I'm fascinated at what I see as the disconnect between the world described (and advocated for) by Patterson and the world inhabited by political bloggers and citizen journalists. Tom is friend of mine and I'm thinking very hard about how it'd be possible to reconcile the two worlds as they exist. Frankly, I see Patterson looking to return to an earlier version of the mainstream model of professional journalism (say, '60s-era) but with radically improved knowledge, professionalism, and socialization. I'm more inclined towards, say, a Glenn Reynolds model of knowledge and information distribution that breaks down accepted hierarchies. Having blogged for 8 years now, I expect my epistemological frame on the credibility of "professional" journalism is quite at odds with Patterson's framework. But it's interesting. And readers know that I'm a lot softer on the mainstream press than most conservative bloggers. That's because I share Patterson's historical understanding of (and nostalgia for) the press as an institution without which citizens' deliberation would be impossible. But more on these issues later.

One other thing about the Weinberger piece is how it reminded me of the bloggers I first read regularly before starting out, especially Althouse, Dan Drezner, and Virginia Postrel. Only Althouse remains a blogger in the classic, daily-update sense. Postrel moved on from daily blogging years ago and Drezner gave it up under duress a few weeks ago. Also, Weinberger's discussion of how blogrolls functioned as social media to build blogging communities brings out a whiff of nostalgia for those earlier times.

In any case, read it all at the link. Weinberg concludes with an affirmation that, indeed, blogs continue to "live."