The Financial Times magazine, which appears on a Saturday when its readers have time to spare from tearing crusts from the bleeding lips of the starving poor, runs a feature by one Trevor Butterworth, with a thin etiolated blog to match.
He concentrates on blogging and journalism, to the exclusion of any other uses of the medium. Butterworth knows his readers well, for he points out several times that blogs generally don't make money, just as in the mid-90s capitalists dismissed the web as the plaything of academics and hobbyists. When the penny dropped they all desperately rushed to try to find ways to make money out of it.
He starts with Gawker though gives a somewhat selective account of Nick Denton's empire, failing to mention Fleshbot, for example, and a very truncated account of what blogs are and how fast they're growing.
His central thesis seems to be that blogs will not replace conventional print media. He's right, to the extent that print media are going to be with us for some time. I subscribe to RSS feeds from several newspapers I read regularly (Guardian, FT, Independent, Irish Times) and more that I rarely or never see in print (Le Monde, Washington Post, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald), but I'm afraid I rarely look at any of these: they sit in a folder in NetNewsWire until I delete them, mostly unread, a few days later. But why,if Butterworth is right, are the newspapers offering RSS? I use blogs to provide me with something much more than any newspaper can provide.
He also charges blogs with "instant obolesence"; this may well be the case, but is a little rich if they are being compared to a medium which the very next day is used to wrap a large huss. The idea of the newspaper of record died a long time ago.
Butterworth discusses several blogs and interviews some of their authors, but doesn't bother to give a list of their addresses or feeds which will frustrate both his readers new to blogs who might want to go and see what it's all about and those who would expect such information to be an integral part of any serious journalism on the subject.
Towards the end it could become more interesting as Butterworth asks his subjects whether they think Marx or Orwell would have blogged. This is in one sense a silly question, akin to asking if they would have used laptops if they had been around in their day. The consensus seems to be that Orwell, the Trotskyite police-spy, would have done and Butterworth contrasts this with Cyril Connolly, Orwell/Blair's fellow Old Etonian and editor at Horizon. But surely the Unquiet Grave has so many of the characteristics of the genre: the short entries, each a meditation on something different, the wide-ranging references to literature, art, mythology here and there? Connolly describes it as a word cycle. I had half a mind to put together palinurus.blogspot.com to demonstrate the point, but someone got there first.... though they cannot be said to have used it wisely or well.
Finally, I wonder if hell has fires hot enough for the sub-editor who picked the Blog Off headline?
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