There was an interesting discussion on this post on the whole “what is different about blogs and MSM “blogs” theme” with George Megalogenis recently. I generally agree with those who argued that whatever takes place on the bulletin boards of the News Limited and Fairfax online empires, it ain’t blogging. Even the reference to commenters as “bloggers” is jarring to anyone who was actually around the blogosphere before the media tried to appropriate it. It’s the lingo, dude! That’s just a small sign of something different going on, but a significant one. Another is evident from Megalogenis’ blog today.
My concern is not what you argue but how you go about it.
My mind is open on pretty much every issue. It’s what journalists do for a living: keep their minds open in the hope that they catch the next new idea out there.
Sadly, what a significant minority of my bloggers do is begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”.
Here’s why those posts grate: My job as a journalist is to assume that the person who disagrees with me doesn’t know what I know. To increase the sum of their knowledge, I can only tell them what I know on their terms, in their language. Which must begin with an assumption that I am not better than my reader.
Anyone who remembers the “civility wars” from a few years back in the Ozblogosphere would also recall the lesson that the worst possible way of getting a more civil commenting community is to call for one! The dreaded meta-post would open old wounds, and bring out the worst in people. The facilitation of community on blogs requires a sense of humour, a democratising of the conversation, and participants who are actually interested in doing practicing community in the first place. None of those things is particularly evident in the MSM “blog” threads for a whole range of reasons. But one of them is the distance between the journalist/columnist and the “readers”, even if they’re anachronistically dubbed “bloggers”.
Trevor Cook has also very astutely picked up on this - the well known phenomenon that the tone of an online space and the deportment of its facilitators will shape the character of the debate - by questioning whether News Limited’s online practice itself isn’t full of ad homs and a sneering and derogatory tone to those who dissent. See his post for more.
A lot of the expectations and framing of the work of the journalist is in terms of the “public sphere” - a presumed space where rational and civil debate takes place (Habermas has a lot to answer for). But as any Rawlsians out there will know, you bring your own status and commitments with when you try to inhabit a “neutral” and “rational” space. And a big part of that is the “professional” - the journalist - talking (even if they try to descend a few inches down the pedestal) from an authoritative speaking position - Megalogenis himself refers to his own professional status and its habits of thought. But we live in a world where arguments from authority are failing, and talk is being democratised (in a sense).
I’d like to counter that image with one I picked up in something I read recently - we should think in terms of a ludic and performative public sphere. We’re not doing world shattering things when we “natter on the net”, to quote Dale Spender. We’re not sorting out the destinies of the world. We are doing something meaningful, and if we approach it in a spirit of play, then you’ve actually got more genuine communication and debate occurring.
Just sayin… 
… so it’s still OK to strike at Strocchi, purr at Pavlov’s, shame Shanahan; just so long as we don’t banish Bahnisch … ?
Kim, you spend so much time linking & posting about News Ltd characters you might as well go and work for them.
N’
Isn’t the ‘blogosphere’ best served by having a diversity of formats as well as opinions? Personally I like the idea of some blogs having strict standards for both posters and commenters, and others maimtaining a hands-off policy.
I don’t think the ’sphere is best served by a one size fits all approach.
Well at least he clearly does look at the comments people make on his blog. Other msm bloggers don’t. Some don’t even read their own posts! I saw one recently whose post concluded with the word END (like that, in caps) obviously that was not meant to be published. It’s impossible to take the content seriously when it’s surreonded by suchlike signals of carelessness and lack of interest.
I find the “fixing up commenters’ spelling and grammar” thing v. strange, but to each his own there, for sure. I would have thought that was the perfect way to make people irrationally resent you *and* to send them the message that you know better than they. (This alas seems to be the effect that correcting spelling and grammar errors on student work has on their attitudes, and a lot of my colleagues just don’t bother.) People who are knowingly crossing the designated line should be silently deleted. As Kim said anything else gets unbearably and unproductively meta.
My basic feeling about how to set and maintain whatever tone you desire, is that you need to do it mainly by conversing in comments. Accept no substitutes.
nasking at #2, jeebus, dude. I’m not doing the whole gandhi “boycott any linking of teh Murdoch - he is teh Satan” thing. While there are many more possible spaces for public debate and the dissemination of information now, and lots of media fragmentation, like it or not major media organisations (and not just News Ltd) do exercise power. I think that it’s vital that power be questioned, spoken back to, held to account. If you ignore it, it doesn’t go away. Ok? You may not agree, but I don’t like the insinuation in your comment.
Yep, agreed, Laura.
And I should say that not everything I say about the MSM bloggers applies to Megalogenis personally. I think what he’s trying to do is worthy of some respect. But I don’t think that he exactly understands how what he does is inseparable from its wider contexts (and that’s the force of Trevor Cook’s points) and that he’s occupying a structural position as well as a personal one, from which it’s very hard to actually provoke the sort of conversation he wants to have.
If he wants to really understand blogging, he should get a blog, dude! As they say…
“If he wants to really understand blogging, he should get a blog, dude!”
I see you ignored my point which was this: Why must he ‘understand blogging’? And if he does indeed understand blogging, why must he adhere to the existing conventions regarding blogging?
Surely the rules of blogging are still sufficiently fluid to allow a blog’s owner to adopt any one of a range of attitudes to commenters.
That’s missing my point, Matt C, which is that:
(a) The MSM “blogs” are parasitic on an already established form, and mainly exist to generate advertising revenue that might have otherwise come from print, hence, as Laura says, the inattention and lack of care of a lot of their authors;
(b) Megalogenis himself is caught between a rock and a hard place, poised between being a blogger and being a journalist, and the second professional identity trumps the first;
(c) Therefore what he wants he won’t get - in terms of civil discussion on his bulletin board. The “existing conventions” - which are, I’d agree with you, pretty fluid - exist for a purpose.
I’d assess the difference between blogs like this one (”traditional” blogs if you like) and those run by MSM print journos in their employers’ papers and journals, as similar to the difference between genuine debate (or wide-ranging, desk-thumping tutorial discussions) and lectures with feedback in which the lecturer controls the content, paradigm and interpretation, selects whose feedback will be heard, whose cut off quickly, whose ignored completely, and when to close feedback time.
In short, most NewsLtd blogs (I’ve found Tim Dunlop’s Blogocracy an exception) are little different from the old “columns + carefully-chosen Letters to the Editor”, except that more letters are allowed.
The blogs & bloggers most disliked by MSM journos are those run by people with similar (if not better) knowledge of the topic and analytical paradigms, and skills in research, presentation and defence of information - many (but by no means all) of them students, academics and those whose jobs involve such knowledge and skills.
Prior to blogging, such people who weren’t journos or senior academics had little scope for presenting contrary views other than at open conferences or on “soapboxes” at open fora. This was especially so if the particular views and research contradicted the self-styled “pundits”.
For centuries, even in democracies, press and learned societies managed to suppress contrary views, especially those of rivals who could argue opposing views cogently, rigorously and (most dangerously of all for elite journo & “expert” egos) persuasively - as Tom Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Becher & Towler’s Academic Tribes and Territories so brilliantly demonstrate.
Megalogenis, for all his admirable qualities, has not yet grasped the reality that some bloggers might know as much as (even more that) he does on a specific topic. I can empathise with his “please be civil” plea, but he works for TheOz, many of whose journos, during the Tom Switzer era, went overboard on the Carl Rove/ Republican Right “very abusive verbal bullying of anyone who does not agree with our political point of view” - and are having a hard time getting back to anything approximating civility, rationality and even-handedness.
This, and the freedom the best on-line fora give to wide-ranging and often contrary opinion, are the real threat blogs pose to those of the commentariat who have built Empires of the Egos on their right to filter or suppress any opinion other than their own. So, in Maslow’s terms, bloggers are seen as a threat to the ego-needs even of well-informed, well-respected journos. How much more of an ego-threat must they be to the general run of OpEd journos.
Like Luddites who declared war on lace-making machines about two decades after cloth making shifted to huge factories with steam-driven spinning & weaving machines, the MSM commentariat are taking up arms against the Blogshpere almost two decades after A/ARnets began to take over their roles, and a decade after blogging irrevocably moved from Ivory Towers to The Real World.
(a) That MSM blogs exist to capture eyeballs only makes them more like every other blog; the only difference is that their blogs - and Gawker Media’s amongst others - for that matter convert those eyeballs into revenue; other blogs, the amateur blogs for lack of a better term, are content to take the attention in its raw form.
(b) Back in the old days, before you kids came along and blogging sold out :- P, some of us liked to refer to ourselves as ‘journalists’ and some of us even meant it in the sense of MSM journalists rather than live journalists. Salon.com pushed that idea with its Radio Userland-powered blog ecology; an idea they pursued at the behest of (journalist) Scott Rosenberg, who was running a blog there as well as traditional stories. Quite a few of the first ‘household name’ blogs - at least in the minority of households that knew what a blog was - were run by tyro or moonlighting journalists. Journalism and blogging has always gone hand in hand. Of course, some us - Winer, Fark, Scoble, Slashdot, Tim Blair - were also really just indulging in mindless link prorogation.
c) The existing conventions - for the kind of article based blogs that LP and Megalogenis are running at any rate - almost dictate speaking from authority. Successful amateur blogs are the ones run by borderline narcissists convinced that what they know on subject x is authoritative and here’s why. Why, you yourself are indulging in the authoritative speaking position, correcting Megalogenis on the True Nature of Blogging; me too. Blogging is nothing if not the indulgence of our belief that Zeus damn it, I’m right!
prorogationpropagation.Kim, not wanting to be antagonistic, but in a slight echo of Nasking’s thoughts - there seems to be an overly ‘defensive’ element to your line of thinking. Why worry about the MSM blogs? LP is a very different medium than the MSM blogs - I wonder how many people visit LP compared to how many read Megalogenis’ ‘blog’? Probably a considerable amount less - but I’d wager that the average LP reader is more informed and certainly more interested in debate.
Don’t sweat the MSM - you do a great job here - I always enjoy reading your points of view - even if I disagree most of the time!
I have to agree with Andrew and Matt C. It’s the internet, people. MSM blogs might imitate independent blogs, but they’re not parasitic, they’re just competition. Dead tree media means you get Megalogenis if you wanted to read the Oz’s coverage of cricket or the job classifieds or Albrechtsen (I hope it doesn’t go that way round). But whether it’s News Ltd or not, you still have to click on Meganomics. Don’t like him, don’t read him. And don’t mock him for seeking his reader’s views about how to make his blog work better - they should be his target, not abstractions about democratising the conversation (although I agree correcting spelling errors is a bit weird).
he posts original material regularly on the internet, with some links. ergo, a blog. if he talks down to his readers and you don’t, maybe you have a better blog. the hits will tell.
Hello Kim,
If I come up with a new phrase for what I do, will you stop misunderstanding it as an attempt to appropriate what you do? (joke)
The call to civility is not an end in itself, but my way of shaking up the readership of Meganomics. The posts on our bulletin blogs are, of their nature, not necessarily representative of the people who read our papers so this poses a dilemma for us: Do we devote more energy to the bulletin blog to entice more readers to post, or do we cut our time losses and concentrate on the journalism?
We seem to have the same problem. Meganomics worked best in an election context. I learned much more from the people who posted there than they could have from me. But lately my site has become a little stale. The same-old hop on, call each other morons, then move onto some other site to have the same argument. What they do is close off others from commenting. It is almost impossible to have a decent debate, and by debate I mean a fight on the facts with passion and wit, on an issue such as emissions trading for example.
Perhaps it was always this way. But a media group can’t seriously enter cyberspace without trying to see if it can work better for those who read its product. Simple business, and common sense.
For now, while the medium is still young, I want to see if it is possible to turn a tiny site like mine into a forum for more readers who do know much more than I do. At the moment, I get too many posts from those who just think they know more than their fellow reader. I’d also like to see if more fun can be had, but that’s a debate for another day.
Cheers
GM
Parasitic in the sense of trying to imitate an already established form and practice.
I chose that word ironically because blogs are often said - in the journos v. bloggers wars - to be parasitic on teh journos.
And I’d really ask you to read with more nuance as to what I said about Megalogenis. I’m not dissing him, and I’m not saying “don’t click on him”.
And if it’s all about the competition, I’d invite you to consider the MSM adoption of blogs as a category killer. The mastheads and the brand recognition mean that they have a huge competitive advantage, if what we judge it by is eyeballs. And they knew that, which is why they started doing it.
GM, thanks, I’ll get back to you - I have a work commitment in 10 minutes.
Yes. It was, GM. You just got noticed enough to become worth it as a playground, is all.
Well it was worth me getting up this morning, Kim; I done learned a new word!
I thought I was pretty **ludic** (if not lucid) in that Olympic T&A thread, the responses I got, not so much.
As to Nas’ point & your response, I was reading an article in the on-line Herald Sun the other day and there was an ad for Bolt, “over 1 million hits per month”. That’s how he, Moranda and Janet get paid so much, even if you are thinking “Christ what an idiot” while you read. So my “Ghandi” like boycott is restricted to these professional contraversialists.
In that vein, I was very tempted to read Moranda on Greer today; the leader looks like the article might contain some truly unmitigated and mind-blowing chutzpah, thus allowing one to ROFLMAO at (not with) Devine Ms M. But NO! Stood firm. Not rewarding that hypocrisy with my li’l click. You never know, that might be the magic click that puts her over some big number, makes an alarm go off in the editor’s office, and she gets a gold roller driven by a dumb chauffeur with her own personal sex dwarf.
Roughly the same goes for blogs too. I can take up to and including a full flame war, so long as everyone’s disagreeing in good faith.
George is a pretty good guy, but it really sets my teeth on edge to hear journalists say things like “My mind is open on pretty much every issue”.
That’s half the problem with modern journalism. It’s one thing to be fair to different sides of an issue by discussing their best arguments and not the pathetic straw man stuff that most of the right-wing commentariat loves. But its seems to me another thing entirely not to take sides.
During the Howard years you could barely open a paper without seeing an opinion piece basically describing how clever Howard was with his wedge politics and how it was creating havoc with Labor. Not whether any of it was moral, sound policy, in keeping with the best traditions of our country, how it affected real human beings. It just described what a clever politician Howard was. The net effect of this kind of journalism is just a kind of worshipping of power.
People who say they keep an open mind on every issue scare me. Great journalists of the past certainly didn’t. And in any event, how open was the press gallery’s mind? How many saw Hansonism coming? How many saw the end of Howard coming? Open to what? Certainly not what was on the minds of ordinary people.
I know people would hate this, but would the quality of comments in a blog be improved if people had to pay a small fee (ie $5) to sign up and post comments. Obviously the number of comments would drop, but it would hopefully mean the people that do post comments have a genuine contribution to make.
Of course, the onus would be on the blogger (or journalist…) to make the content worth the fee though.
I should add, I was probably talking more about MSM blogs (I’m using blogs in the all inclusive, ‘matt c’ sense of the word.
Does someone who says “My mind is open on pretty much every issue” not understand he will be a complete laughing stock? George, you’re on such a high pedestal we can all see up your dress.
Besides numerous OZ journos all downloaded my Brian Burke ringtone this week and the bastards didn’t even attribute me. That’s not going to increase my civility.
http://theworstofperth.com/2008/08/21/attributeless-on-the-membrane/
Obviously the number of comments would drop, but it would hopefully mean the people that do post comments have a genuine contribution to make.
On the other hand, wankers could simply treat it as a fee they pay for the right to abuse one another. Interesting suggestion, but.
Hey Mega - if I can’t say fuck I don’t want yr revolution.
It seems to me there may be an inverse square law between ‘ civilty’, comity, conviviality, collegial relations, and etc AND really, REALLY fucking stale white bread politics.
You want the living, breathing, sweating, staring, happening, bleeding edge of politics, George, then naturally you go to the fucking minority.
Its the fringe stupid.
Margy Mead said it better than me - ‘ Never doubt, etc, etc…’
And so did Nikita - ‘ We will bury you ‘
@GM Cash for comment? Quick, call Jonesy!
Play? Play!?
Sure, we all know that blogging isn’t a matter of life and death…it’s way more serious than that!
I don’t blog for play. I blog so as to engender my own personal army of borg/flying monkeys who will rise up and do my bidding, with lashings of fawning adulation thrown in for free. Onward the ranks of the 101 Fighting Keyboards!
I’ll let Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz have the last word…
Yeah, but, Sean, playing doesn’t involve an absence of rules or norms! As kids in the proverbial sandpit know!
#
In that vein, I was very tempted to read Moranda on Greer today; the leader looks like the article might contain some truly unmitigated and mind-blowing chutzpah, thus allowing one to ROFLMAO at (not with) Devine Ms M. But NO! Stood firm. Not rewarding that hypocrisy with my li’l click. You never know, that might be the magic click that puts her over some big number, makes an alarm go off in the editor’s office, and she gets a gold roller driven by a dumb chauffeur with her own personal sex dwarf.
Roughly the same goes for blogs too. I can take up to and including a full flame war, so long as everyone’s disagreeing in good faith…
Yes, that is a problem. Blog on unsavoury X and reward them with a link? Blog about unsavoury Y and potentially give them oxygen?
I think one of the conventions that’s important is to allow readers to make their own mind up by linking - so that you’re not just getting the author of the post’s take and others can easily challenge their interpretation or call them on a misrepresentation.
Having said that, there are some really offensive sites I’d draw the line at linking to, but I’d mention that.
One thing absent from most of the MSM “blogs” is any linking. That’s partly a result of the legacy of print culture, I think, but also of a less democratic view of writing.
.
Good call. I read it and I think my head asplode.
Stupid not-closed tag thingy.
Fixed!
For anyone who’s worried about contributing to ad-revenue on the horrid MSM sites, remember that if you have an advertising blocker installed o your browser then they shouldn’t see money from your click - the display ads only register a hit if they are actually served to your browser, and that’s what the advert blocker blocks. If you play with the options so that the default is to block anything other than the few sites that you don’t mind supporting, then your clicks will not be earning Rupert et al any direct monies.
Your clicks might still be contributing to them being able to say “over 1M hits” or whatever the impressive number is, but are these numbers transparently audited in any case?
Yep, according to the same metrics which give us 1.4 million “hits” a month. But unlike Andrew Bolt we don’t brag about it!
/tongue in cheek
GM, one of the points I’m trying to make is that as the blogosphere evolved organically over the years, a whole range of protocols developed which help in facilitating community and producing good discussion that’s fun and informative. I think that when the MSM took to “blogging”, and Rupe ordained that News Ltd papers would go down that route, only the superficialities of the form were imported. Given that there’s considerable expertise - much of which pro bloggers and consultants now tout to private businesses wanting to get into web 2.0 - around, I wonder why training wasn’t offered to journos (I assume it wasn’t - except in the technical sense perhaps). There’s a whole heap of knowledge out there about the distinct skills of facilitating community and discussion as well as aggregating knowledge about politics and economics or whatevs. It’s an odd, and I think significant, blindness in a profession devoted, after all, at least in theory to communication.
tigtog, for instance, could sort out the wheat from the chaff among your “bloggers” in about ten seconds flat and do it with style and verve!
Hello Kim,
I understand your point. But you are making too many assumptions about our supposed lack of technical, or institutional knowledge of blogging.
As you say, the media companies are in your space for two reasons: to chase readers and revenue. That happens to be why our bulletin blogs begin with the premise that all are welcome. Not because we didn’t know where that would lead us, but because media companies couldn’t hop onto the net and began censoring the feedback they received to fit some preconceived notion of what is okay.
We have to learn it our way, because we are, as you say, doing it for different reasons. That’s not me speaking as a corporate voice, by the way, because i don’t have one of those.
As for what I do, I have a simple dilemma. I have more readers than posters. I’d like to hear from more of the readers, which is why I am challenging the regular posters to change their tone, or go somewhere else.
I must say what is most weird about this discussion is that blogs such as yours crave content generated by the mainstream media, yet your participants very rarely hop onto our sites to talk to us directly. Possum is an exception, of course.
Cheers
GM
@GM, I can’t speak for the others here but the reason I don’t is that most MSM sites comments facilities are often too slow to have comments appear which makes it hard to have and enjoy a free flowing discussion.
GM, the ration of readers to commenters is usually about 99:1 on a blog with an extensive readership. That’s never going to change as such, but there are ways and means of being inviting to ensure that people are welcome to join the 1% if they like.
Btw, here’s a prime example of why bloggers might be a tad sceptical about the bona fides of some in the MSM - Christian Kerr denouncing us, without mentioning us, in case anyone wants to find out for themselves:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/08/22/christian-kerr-troll-blogging-at-the-australian/
Thats one area that the MSM should have an advantage over much smaller organisations. They should be able to sell ads directly rather than via third parties and thus serve the images from the same server as all the other images on the website. Adblockers wouldn’t be able to distinguish between normal images on their sites and adverts.
GM - a couple of technical features which might help with civility or at least reduce the impact of the lack of civility of some people.
- Allow people to create accounts which allow them to make posts from people they choose not to appear to them. Group moderation schemes can also help here so people can moderate comments up or down and people set a threshold at which they want to see posts.
- Thread comments rather than one big list. Not only is it easier to follow conversations within comments, but its easier to ignore the flame wars that inevitably occur when a site gets popular.
GM- it seems a little simplistic to say that blogs such as this crave MSM content, yet we don’t want to participate in the forums. there must be something else going on. I am inclined to think that Phil is right that it is the moderation thing that slows things down, meaning that it becomes serial monologue rather than dialogue.
I for one once put something on an OZ blog only to see it never revealed- and i can assure you that it was civil (I’d like to add insighful but that would have been for others to work out had they been allowed to see it)
The point is really that they are different mediums and I don’t buy the competition thing insofar as it means if I particpate in one I am not participating in another. They do different things and the great thing for us great unwashed is to be able to particpate in all of them and hear a variety of perspectives. What they do demonstrate it that we all reveal ourselves by what we say and where we say it, and in doing that we are the same as everybody else
Moderation as well as poor site design (eg most recent comment first!?!?) are a couple of reasons I rarely bother. But I think its also important to note that by linking to MSM sites, blogs like these are participating with the MSM.
In the world of web 2.0 no site should expect to hold the conversation purely on their server. Perhaps the MSM sites should start displaying trackbacks and creating mashups of the whole conversation, rather than just displaying what is recorded directly on their site.
I agree 100% with Chris @ 42:
It’s interesting that some of the News blogs (not the Oz, but certainly Bolt’s blog) specify a trackback URI and even list “0 Trackbacks” on every post, yet they don’t actually implement trackback functionality. I presume this is because providing a direct path for traffic to exit their own site is a nice way of reducing page hits and ad revenues. But I suggest that opening the News blogs to broader engagement with non-media blogs by allowing trackbacks would increase traffic in the long run.
I just posted a bit more about my own decision-making about when to comment and when to post on my own blog that ties in to this issue.
I’ve always assumed the limited interaction allowed on MSM blogs was based on legal liability. I know that the same laws would apply to all Australian blogs. I just thought that Rupert would be a lot more likely target for a disgruntled perrson and their solicitors.