A seminar on Minnesota blogging, starring the mainstream media

Yesterday I attended something called a “bloginar” (God, what a word) sponsored by WCCO-TV. Special guests were Jason DeRusha of WCCO and former Star Tribune journalist Eric Black. Both mainstream media figures; both blogging these days, and both fairly successful at commanding an audience. (read more)

First off: I didn’t know who Mr. DeRusha was, when I arrived at this meeting. I’m not ashamed to say that, because even though I’m a news junkie I don’t watch television news—haven’t for years. Which tells you something right there about the effect of the blogs and the Internet on news coverage: I don’t need television news, to be more informed about what’s going on in Minnesota than most of the people on the street. The technology makes it possible for me to “make my own newspaper” out of feeds from Reuters and the AP and local Minnesota online news sources—which means that thanks to the Internet, intermediaries like Mr. DeRusha are somewhat superfluous.

But DeRusha and Black were a draw, for this crowd—precisely because they are mainstream names. I suspect that if WCCO-TV had headlined the event with local bloggers instead of “names” like DeRusha and Black, attendance would have been lower.
Which gives you a clue about the key role that the supposedly dying mainstream media still plays these days.

We’ll get to that, but first: why do people do grass-roots news blogs? Now I know why people do blogs about their careers, or blogs about kitties, or blogs about their favorite movie star or music blog. But why do people spend so much uncompensated time writing for political blogs, for news blogs?

The same reason that people start newspapers, the same reason that the very rich buy newspaper chains or broadcast media. It’s not to make money, it’s not just so “they can be heard”; it’s so they can influence people. They want to influence the minds of the people reading the blog—and, if possible, more people than that. Some bloggers do it by printing the truth, as best as they can source it. Other bloggers don’t hesitate to print lies, if the lies will influence the audience the way the blogger desires.

There are plenty of blogs that parrot someone else’s agenda; you think of supposedly independent blogs by Republicans or Democrats that simply disseminate the week’s talking points under the guise of a blog. But I’ve never heard of anyone starting a blog just so they can parrot the news as available in the mainstream media—who would read such a thing?

People do political blogs because they think there’s a story that should be told, that isn’t being told. As newspapers and broadcast media dumb down, try to survive by being as inoffensive as possible, the bloggers take up the slack—for better or worse.

My very limited experience as a print journalist taught me the same lesson. When our local paper fired me after two years, they did so because I wrote a controversial column. (I did practically every week, but this was the one that triggered the firing.) It made no difference that the allegations in the column were true (they were), it made no difference that my editor at the time had approved the column prior to printing. The column was so controversial among leading figures in our small town that they pressured the editor to fire me—and she did.

The idea that a writer could be fired simply for generating controversy is supposedly anathema, to journalists. Journalists are supposed to deal with controversy; they’re supposed to report the facts about controversies. But that truism is being stood on its head in the twenty first century—corporate newspaper chains, starved of readers and advertising dollars, working business model where increased circulation is seen as “an expense” and staff layoffs are seen as the indispensable key to profitability. Members of the print media now operate in this sort of terrified limbo where the possibility of alienating a large number of readers encourages them to emphasize vapid information over valuable information—information that could make a real difference in the lives of the readers.

I don’t subscribe to newspapers. When I was in Minneapolis during the “bloginar,” I was reminded why—the front page of the Star Tribune featured a color picture of Batman, from the new Batman movie. The front page of the opposition paper, the Pioneer Press, had a completely different take—they featured a color picture of the Joker. I don’t need this; I don’t need to devote time to reading people who think that kind of stuff is important enough to put on the front page. We’re fighting a rotten, deeply unstable economy, and we’re fighting two wars in the Middle East—why would a thinking person take you seriously, if that’s what you think demands public attention.

Well, there is a reason. At the seminar, Eric Black and Jason DeRusha deplored the present state of reporting and commended the relative freedom of blogging. But when I asked Black about how his political influence as a blogger compared to his influence as a print journalist for the Star Tribune, he answered candidly: it was “less.” Earlier he’d talked about the fact that the role of the newspaper was declining, but it has to be admitted that the newspapers and broadcast media are still the “golden door” for political bloggers—“the great day,” for a political blogger, is when a story you’ve been working to cover, is picked up by the mainstream media. And that’s the reason that the mainstream media still matters, very much. When they pick up a story from your blog, your story becomes “legitimate” in the eyes of the public.

And if your story is not picked up by the mainstream media—it doesn’t matter how true that story is, how well sourced or documented, how important the story is—it will be largely ignored, except by the people who regularly read your blog. That is the hard fact; your “true and important story” remains out in digital void, and they run the pictures of Batman and the Joker instead.

Before the meeting started, I cornered Black and asked him what the biggest story he was working on was, right now. He couldn’t think of one to tell me about (which kind of surprised me) but he mentioned a series he’d done on former Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Mike Hatch. That surprised me, too—I don’t read the blog that Black writes for now, but you would think that if a respected journalist like Eric Black had done a series of informative pieces on so prominent a local figure as Mike Hatch, it would have drifted into my orbit somehow. I faithfully read MPR’s Daily Digest on Minnesota politics, every day that they print it; I write about politics in Minnesota and know scores of people who do the same. And I know that I would have known about the Hatch series if Black was still at the Strib. So why had I never heard anything at all about it, before I asked Black.

The answer is right there: it’s because Black doesn’t write for the Strib anymore. Without the Strib behind him, as a blogger, he no longer has the wherewithal “to make a story a story.” In that respect he’s now like the rest of us out here on the blogosphere—writing the news that the papers don’t print, doing the deep coverage that the broadcast media can’t do—hoping that the bed-ridden, decaying old mainstream media will do us a favor and pick it up for publication, so that it becomes a “real” story, a story that changes minds.

The established media, going down the drain economically and in terms of content, will still be relevant for a long time, because they can still do what grass-roots bloggers can’t—command the attention of very large numbers of people and define “the stories” for them. And those two capabilities are a must if you want to be really effective at changing people’s minds.