In his maiden post in a new Corante blog, former Big Media online guy Bob Cauthorn engages in a most unfortunate (and quite overwritten) exercise in new-media blog-snobbery :
Memo to mainstream media: You don’t get to blog.You have a publishing apparatus. So you don’t get to blog. You have a broadcasting apparatus. So you don’t get to blog.
In case you missed this the point while you were reading up on youth slang, I’ll repeat it for emphasis. You. Do. Not. Get. To. Blog.
Who are you, Cauthorn, to say who can and who cannot blog?
You are trying to import the worst traits of old, big media — exclusion, snobbishness, the closed club — to citizens’ media. And it is most unbecoming, especially since you served in both worlds, since you yourself are a mainstream media guy who is now, uh, bloging (can you smell the irony, Bob?). You make fun of “a very senior, 50-something editor at a well-known American newspaper” but, you know, Bob, you’re looking a little long in the tooth yourself, fella. And once upon a time, don’t you remember, you saw online for the first time. You learned new tricks, dog. Why can’t that old fart (who happens to be my age, by the way)? I thought ours was the new medium of inclusion. But not according to you.
Now, of course, there are countless clueless blogs from big media people, who think this is just another publishing tool and that they must publish with it. There are too many “blogging” columnists who don’t know what the hell a link is. I, too, always tell big media folks that their first response to blogging should be to read, not to write — that we have owned the printing press for centuries and now, at last, the people own the press and they’re speaking and it’s our turn to listen. Oh, on that, we agree.
But to say that someone should not blog? That is importing the very worst of old media into new, creating a closed society. You’re building a pedestal, putting yourself above and apart from an audience, just like old media, just like Dan Rather. And we know that he had a fall and that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Dan back together again. Beware, Bob: Don’t set yourself — and bloggers — up for such a fall.
Once the big-media guys do read blogs and listen to them and link to them and respect them, I do believe there is some value in them blogging, too, for one good reason: They join the conversation.
Read Steve Baker and Heather Green at Business Week, an old, big media outlet if there ever was one. They enter into a conversation with their public. They ask for help from readers, even soliciting questions they should ask in interviews. They explain how things happen behind the scenes at their big, old mag. They engage their critics at eye level. They are a great example of what can happen if big-media reporters and editors take blogging seriously and realize that it is a new opportunity to build a new relationship with the public they serve. They have everything to gain from that and so do their readers (and now fellow conversationalists). I can point to other examples, at The Guardian, for example (but, sadly, not at your old newspaper).
But you would cut these saplings off before they could sprout. You ridicule these efforts. For shame.
How much better it would be if you took your experience working for (cough) big media and (ahem) blogs and suggested how your former colleagues should approach this new and wonderful world. Instead, you slam the door in their face and then stick your tongue out at them from the other side.
This is how bloggers get a bad reputation. This is how journalism got a bad reputation. We should know better.
: LATER: Rex Hammock, a fellow 50ish (sorry, Rex) old-media blogger piles on:
I’ll confess, I’m a die-hard old-media guy and, frankly, the only thing I know about blogging comes from making a few thousand posts on this weblog since 1990 and reading, perhaps, a few hundred thousand posts on other blogs during that same time. But despite this limited knowledge, my brief foray into the whole blogosphere thing has taught me this: The first rule of blogging is, “never attempt to make up rules about blogging.” The second rule of blogging is, “if you think God has called you to be the Moses of blogging, please wait a few months after coming down from the mountain-top before issuing your commandments.” And the third rule of blogging is, never use the word “jiggy.”
great post Jeff – I read posts like Bob’s and shudder as I think of how pretentious they come across as.
These snobbish types suffer superiority complex to hide their inferiority.
Amen, Brother Jeff.
Wouldn’t it have been more useful for Cauthorn to illustrate, in his seemingly veteran view, the difference between blogging and pretending to blog? It’s the latter he seems most worried about. But I think Internet participants and consumers will sort signal from noise without, upon consideration of the source, automatically dismissing mainstream media.
Oops. Did I say I started my blog in 1990. I meant to say 2000. Of course, that’s the kind of senility thing that sets in after you get to be as old as Jeff and I are.
I had the same feeling when I first started to read this piece yesterday. But by the end, I realized he was just going over the top for effect, to push his point that this is two-way communication, that just spitting out the same stuff doesn’t help the enterprise. Read it again, get over the “you don’t get to blog” part, and I think you will see what he’s really talking about.
You learned new tricks, dog.
The first time I read this sentence, I kept thinking “ghetto” and “rap.” I got it the second time, but it’s still hilarious.
Jeff,
Thanks for the very kind words. We have learned so much in just our few short months of blogging. There is a new type of freedom of expression and discussion that you get with blogging that I really welcome. The direct feedback, the unexpected and insightful comments, the humbling experiences, the stretching of muscles we never really use in traditional journalism,and what we still need to learn–I love it.
Poor Bob. He observed that among the hundred (or is it now hundreds?) of staff-written blogs that big media companies have launched during the past few years, a person can count on his fingers the number that are actually worth reading. He should have known better than to gore a new-media sacred cow such as blogging — even if he was writing about only media staff written blogs.
I’m not surprised that his poking a sacred cow resulted in his receiving ad hominem counterattacks (‘Who are you, Cauthorn, to say who can and who cannot blog?’) from one of the high priests. But what does surprises me here is the priest himself has a very long history of blogging his own opinions about who should and shouldn’t be doing what online. Doesn’t Bob have an equal right to do so, even if his opinions are contrary to the new dogma?
Anyone who questions who he is to have said what he’s said needs to question their own right to say such things, too. The fact is you each have that right. Blessed be free speech, even when contrary to the new dogma. So, if you want to refute what Bob says, refute what he says, not him personally or how he says it.
With strikingly rare exceptions (hello, beloved Guardian), media staff written blogs are as boring and popular as wet newsprint. Bob wasn’t ‘importing the very worst of old media into new’ but pointing to justly failed examples of such import. He wasn’t cutting ‘these saplings off before they could sprout’, but suggesting that perhaps the roots of one-to-many big media thinking don’t transplant into many-to-many new-media soil. The real shame here is people who try to cover that up.
Jeff, while I don’t necessarily disagree with anything you’ve written here, I think that you’ve buried the lead by dwelling on this one aspect.
Who cares…
Stop talking about blogging, seriously.
Talking about blogs on your weblog, is rediculous…
Who cares?
Jeff,
Totally agree with your take, although I think Cauthorn used a cheap trick – outrageousness – to get attention for Corante’s latest blog. I grant him the point that many traditional news outlets don’t get blogging yet but they will. For what it’s worth, I wrote a response that can be found at:
http://evans.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2005/7/31/1094164.html
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