You know why there are bloggers, @Newshour? Because there is “safety first” reasoning in news. People get sick of it and take up their pens.”

Young doesn’t entirely agree – not that the performance of the media in reportage isn’t a jumping off point for the desire to blog – but that the problem with mainstream journalism is “safety first”. He presents three hypotheses which might explain the quality of political reporting and commentary. I think he’s definitely onto something here, though I’d also add that the structure of the media and its corporate logics are also factors we should take note of.

The post concludes:

…perhaps the urge to blog is driven not so much by the tendency of journalists towards “safety first”, but because journalists are by and large socially homogenous and don’t reaffirm the views of most bloggers, who in reaction create their own social networks.

Which is not why I blog at all, but then, I am an statistically inadequate sample, and this post is pure speculation on which I hope to get some feedback from other bloggers.

Part of the academic stuff I’m working on this year goes to the question of the motivation for the creation of “user-generated content”. In the context of political blogging, I’m not at all certain that the sorts of categories the citizen journalism literature employs – ie “monitorial citizen”, “public sphere” and so on – are at all adequate for understanding the desire to blog.

To the degree that they aren’t just dependent on a reinscription of the whole “public purpose” argument about journalism in a new frame and a range of concepts about public deliberation which are too abstract, I think they’re probably a post facto effect rather than a motivator. In fact, I’m not entirely sure there’s as strong a correlation between the quality of the media and the impulse to blog as everyone seems to think. So I’d be very interested in others’ observations!

Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.