by Jonathan Rauch
With my triumph over the blogosphere complete, and my guest-blogging stint over, I'd like to leave with two words of advice to my friends in old media:
Fight back.
There are plenty of problems with old media. But not least among those problems, I'm convinced, is old media's reluctance to defend itself when the blogophere uses it as a punching bag. Which is always. Bloggers' most common response to my criticisms of their medium is not to respond at all, but to change the subject to how pathetic old media is. Old media people respond with meek, depressed silence, instead of by, say, pointing out that the MSM produces vastly more value on a bad day than the blogosphere does on a good one.
I think there are a couple of reasons for our diffidence. One is our years of training to let people yell at us; no matter how mad folks get, we're supposed to turn the other cheek and get on with our jobs, because that's what responsible journalists do. Moreover, so often have we been told we're arrogant (often by people, like Sarah Palin, with opportunistic reasons to tell us) that we expect to be whipped. Well, there are times for more arrogance, and now is one of them. (In my gay life, we call it "pride.")
A second reason is that we have internalized the depression our industry is facing. If the market is beating up on us, if new media is growing and we're shrinking, if we're being laid off and leaving the business in droves, that must be our fault. If only by dint of its success, the blogosphere, we assume, is entitled to be smug.
We would do well to bear in mind that the blogosphere doesn't have a business model, it has a hobby model. With important exceptions like AndrewSullivan.com, even most commercial blogs and new media websites struggle to squeeze drops of profit out of cheesecloth content. (Typical analysis, from Newsweek, an unimpeachable source: "HuffPo has a big audience, but like most Web sites, it can’t monetize it very well. Right now, HuffPo generates just over $1 per reader per year. That’s nothing compared with the mainstream-media outlets that HuffPo hopes to displace.")
More important: the world is moving back in our direction. App-land—the universe of the smartphone (5 billion of them!) and the iPad and the Kindle—is a place where discerning people look for, and often will pay for, high-quality content presented in a reader-friendly, undistracting, controlled environment. That's our territory. We can function there; blogs can't. As I've said several times, now, the blogosphere may be around for a while, but its heyday is over.
What's oldest about old media is not its analog platforms, from stela to newsprint, though those are certainly old, but its ability to satisfy the innate human craving for immersive story, sustained argument, and accurate information, aka knowledge, aka truth. And that is a great and fundamental strength, not a weakness.
So repeat after me: David Broder was a superb journalist. Look in the mirror every morning and say it three times. Say it loud, say it proud. When your efforts to tell multiple sides of the story, to set your opinions to one side, to go find things out, and to get your facts straight—when those efforts lead bloggers to accuse you of "high Broderism," tell them you accept the compliment. And offer to help them reach the same level someday.
The Dish 