by Matt Barr

Ode to a small lump of green putty I found in my armpit one midsummer morning

[Source of post title, for the hopelessly out of touch]

Is there a blog -- new media, Army of Davids, wisdom of crowds, blah, blah -- revolution going on? One that will hollow the Dinosaur Legacy Mainstream Media into an Ozymandius-like shell, surveying its dead works, playing Nearer My God To Thee and toasting to its own castrated power? The people telling you so are all trying to make money off such an allegedly burgeoning revolution. Have you noticed? So, set that aside.

Is Citizen Media simply the next Internet bubble, bloated fit to pop once information consumers realize news dailies are more than four sections and 80 pages of op-eds a day? The people telling you so are members of the Dinosaur Legacy Mainstream Media, who are probably sick of hearing how the asteroid is coming and Ben Affleck and Steve Buscemi went up there without Bruce Willis.

It's all noise, in other words, as is most stuff covered on blogs, but this is navel-gazing, self-aggrandizing, preening, echo-chamber noise, which is tons more annoying. Big-traffic blogs that caterwaul about how the DinosaurLegacyMainstream Media could possibly fail to cover such and such pet story or could devote so much attention to this or that nonsense labor under the illusion their complaints are qualitatively different from the world-class athletes and professional coaches with decades of experience who talk over their cube walls on Monday about how the football team boned it big time over the weekend.

Now, what the DLMSM is or isn't telling us is terrific fodder for conversation, including the online variety. Blogs at their root, when commenting about news coverage, are letters to the editor. (You don't have to be brief, cordial or spell stuff right to get them published, either!) Or, you know, people talking over their cube walls.

Then, though, there's the guy in the office who decides to talk loudly enough for everyone to hear and offer what he considers the official office take on the news. In real life, people drop their jaws briefly in disbelief before shaking it off and returning to what they were doing, or chuckle and shake their heads, or tell the Poindexter to shut the hell up. In the blogosphere, we go hear! hear! and enter the site's caption contest.

What accounts for this? Online communities are of indefinite size, unlike your office environment, and leave a great deal to the imagination. There is a human impulse to be part of a grand, cohesive band of brothers, where everyone shares your senses of outrage and humor, are attractive and think you're exceedingly clever. When you routinely see and know everyone in your community, such as your coworkers, there are no illusions, and you spend most of your time trying to make everyone understand you're not like them in key ways.

What motivates some bloggers to try and cover every bit of news they think is important on their sites? Not your Red States and Daily Koses, those sites are trying to channel like minded activism into a credible outlet. I mean the sites that have entries like "Cheney said to have shot hunting buddy" and "Bush inaugurated" and such. Far be it from me if they're working their way into a revenue-generating model of some sort that I can't immediately imagine, but is that really the gold standard for blogs? Sites where you get your news... via quotes and links to DLMSM websites?

In my far from influential opinion, blogs are valuable, and will exist in five years, as commentary sites, places you can go to read perspectives on unique, niche-y things that are important to you. If you're interested in the Supreme Court and Constitution, maybe you'll plug New World Man into your aggregator and check in once in a while to see what I'm saying about those things. What a coincidence! You think the best blogs are... most like yours! No, not best, not at all. I think the best blog by this model is something like Hit and Run, the kind of countercommentary and perspective you don't get much of anywhere else. You don't read Hit and Run to find out that D.C. has implemented a smoking ban in public places, but you do expect to learn there that Congress has exempted itself from it.

Contra: Sites the value proposition of which purports to be the deployment of bloggers to cover actual news stories. (I have long suspected that the deal there is trying to get high-traffic bloggers to link to one another to drive network page impressions to boost ad rates, but that's not what the value proposition purports to be.) If you take as given that DLMSM reportpersons have an inextricable institutional bias that prevents them from covering stories correctly, you still have to weigh that liability against assets like news bureaus, equipment, distribution infrastructure, networks of background and on-the-record sources, access, travel budgets and so on. It's hard for me to believe there's a net negative in most cases.

But at least they have some coin behind them. Sites that try to be all things for free confound me. There's a flag-planting, territory-conquering aspect to it, I'm sure, but enough to try and be DLMSM outfits with more exclamation points with little hope for meaningful remuneration? I've seen too many endeavors, online ones especially, that try to conquer the world fizzle when their own unreasonable expectations aren't met to think that's a good idea.

I've blogrolled and visit a few of the sites I'm talking about, and I don't mean to suggest they're not worth anyone's time. I just don't think they do what they're unaccountably trying to do as well as sites that spend a lot of money and manpower trying to do the same thing for profit. Free markets, etc. For myself, I will cheerfully ignore most important news stories until I think I can add a perspective I haven't seen and find interesting. I will still imagine that all you readers are attractive and think I'm exceedingly clever, though.

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