On bloggers and journalists, 20 years on

In the early days of this blog, before the undergraduate journalism students I met for the first time on Friday were even born, there was an endless online discussion about what the difference was between a blogger and a journalist. John Naughton resurrected this discussion in an excellent column for The Observer (for sale!), commemorating Dave Winer’s 30 years of blogging:

In my experience, most journalists failed to understand the significance of the blogosphere. This was partly due to the fact that, like Dr Johnson, they thought that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, and so bloggers must be weird. (Which is hard for those of us who happen to be both bloggers and hacks.)

This is probably why so many understand “Substacks” better than they did blogging: the path to making an income from your writing is so much more obvious. That, at least, is one problem we’ve solved over the past decades.

But John has another observation to make.

The Social Media shiny object

Why do so many journalists assume blogging is the past?

[…] it was mainly because mainstream media was hypnotised – and blind-sided – by the vertiginous rise of social media. Journalists came to assume that the blogosphere must be old hat, a relic of the past, a meeting place for cranks, nerds and ponytailed men wearing shoes like Cornish pasties. Social media was what mattered.

Now, it all depends on what you mean by “mattered”. For much of the 2010s, social media was where the traffic was coming from — and that’s a pretty good definition of “mattered” for most journalists. But what always defined blogging (and the same is true of *shudder* Substacking…) was it was where ideas were defined and then tested.

John again:

If that is indeed what they thought, then Winer has news for them: the blogosphere is alive and well and thriving. In fact, it’s where much of the best writing – and thinking – of our era is to be found.

Amen.

Should everyone blog?

Ben Werdmuller, commenting on John’s piece:

My position: everyone should blog. Every new voice adds something new to the conversation.

20-odd years ago, I’d have agreed with him. While the name of this site is mainly a terrible play-on-words based on One Man & His Dog, it also expressed the idea that one person should have one blog, where they contributed to a public discourse of ideas.

But I don’t agree any more.

I’m not sure everyone wants or is capable of doing that. But those who are inclined to do so are creating something valuable. And they were at it even before the bog came along.

Dave himself addressed this:

In my day, we were the kinds of people who started underground newspapers, or who volunteered for the student radio station at college.

As a guy who ran a newspaper for the kids on my street while I was in primary school, and who started my career in students newspapers, how can I disagree?