Blogs: flavor of moment or publishing revolution?

I’m quoted in today’s Richmond (Virg.) Times Dispatch in a story titled Blogs: flavor of moment or publishing revolution? I met the author, McGregor McCance, at the session Rusty Foster and I gave on weblogs at the new media conference in Berkeley the other week.

Here’s the exchange McGregor and I had by email; about half of this wound up in his column.

McCance: Weblogs are the hot media topic du jour, but they’ll soon fade away and we won’t remember what all the fuss was about.

Lasica: While weblogs may be the hot media topic of the moment, I don’t believe they’ll dwindle into obscurity and irrelevance a couple of years from now. But I also don’t think they’ll knock off the Times Dispatch or replace traditional news outlets. Instead, I think we’ll see a gradual and steady uptick in their use over the next several years.

It’s an enticing, almost intoxicating, media form, one that I don’t think people are ready to abandon to return to yesterday’s news. We’ll still need a corps of professional journalists to help ferret out important stories, to report from remote locations, to provide balance and context to the news. But beside big media journalism we’ll see a mixture of opinion, commentary and analysis from the grassroots, as ordinary people find their voices and add their writings, warts and all, to the media mix.

Blogs are completely overhyped. I think if you take the time to set up a blog and talk to yourself (as many of them surely operate) that’s fine. but don’t tell me how blogs are changing our methods of communication.

Nope. They are changing the way we communicate. Instead of a one-way conversation, where a cadre of professionals holds forth on the news, the weblog universe connects people with other people and ensures that alternative voices and points of view are heard. That shouldn’t be minimized. Long after a reporter has finished a story and gone on to her next topic, the blogosphere will continue thrashing her story about, adding new angles, insights and perspectives. Blogs won’t replace traditional news media, but they will supplement them in important ways.

Blogs will not supplant the need for edited reports from journalists. Rather, they will heighten the need for professional reports that at least attempt to institute some fact-checking before publication.

You’re right, blogs won’t supplant the need for edited news stories. But look closely at what most weblogs do. They point to news stories in traditional newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets and then add their own riff or interpretation. That personal voice and point of view is sorely missing in objective journalism.

Blogs will be dead in two years. bloggers will get bored or get excited about something else. will this simply reflect the evolution of online communications or reveal how much of a “blip” blogging really is? (thank god “only time will tell,” and i will not be accountable for anything i write or say.)

No way. That’s what they said two years ago, and instead weblogging has moved from a trendy, fringe phenomenon to become a mainstream phenomenon. The tools continue to become easier and cheaper so that non-techie types like homemakers, teenagers and even lawyers are trying it out. Not everyone will keep it up, but plenty of others will take their place. As traditional media becomes bigger and more impersonal, weblogs are one of the few outlets where ordinary folks can still have their voices heard.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.