The Financial Times has run one of the best, most-encompassing, articles about blogging that I've ever seen, though it ends on a remarkably-pessimistic note. It's lengthy, but worth reading if you're interested in the blogging phenomenon. It says a lot of things I've mused about, like this quote:
“As for blogs taking over big media in the next five years? Fine, sure,” he added. “But where are the beginnings of that? Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds. And they're all excited about the global reach of blogs?
I've been saying that all along. The blogger's reach is limited: He can't afford to subscribe to the AP wire or pay staff to watch it, he doesn't have time to investigate, he can't do a lot of the stuff that regular journalists can do. We'll continue to need regular newspapers and magazines. Need proof? Look at the links on bloggers' sites: they're to newspapers and magazines. In a sense, bloggers are parasites: feeding off the work of journalists and then also draining away readers from journalists.
Bloggers do a handful of things well: they offer different perspectives, they compare stories from different media sources and find problems, they raise unique questions, they can be funny, they can gear material to niche audiences. There's a place for bloggers and, I think, there always will be.
I don't see blogs disappearing. They stand at 28.6 million (though I suspect the figure is grossly distorted; it probably includes many blogs that haven't been updated in weeks). That many sites don't disappear over night or even over the course of a few years.
So what do I predict? The old economy will absorb the blogging phenomenon (as newspapers have already begun to do by starting their own) and the number of blogs will stop climbing. The number of "active" blog (those updated at least a couple of times every week) currently constitute less than 15% of the 28 million. As the fad wears off, the number of active blogs will drop steadily.
What will happen to blogs? I suspect there'll be more (i) group blogs, where lots of people participate for public enjoyment, (ii) local blogs, where bloggers talk about parochial interests, and (iii) personal blogs, where bloggers write for the enjoyment of a handful of friends and family. I tend to believe that the number of blogs like TDE--the one-man show that addresses a variety of topics, albeit from a definite perspective--will stop climbing and begin to dwindle. I see lots of great blogs (Wonderdawg, for instance) that get fewer than 50 visitors a day. That's gotta be discouraging. If I received those types of numbers, I would keep blogging, but my blog would probably become an online personal journal. I'd simply cut-and-paste stuff from my writer's journal (taking out the dirty stuff--chuckle), no matter whether any cares to read it or not.
What does it mean for this blog? Nothing. I get a genuine kick out of blogging, especially knowing that hundreds of people come every day (500 yesterday, though some were repeats). TDE will continue to morph (regular readers may have noticed that I am writing a lot more original script these past few weeks), but I don't see myself stopping.
I can't. It's a disease. Maybe it's a disease that'll kill me as a writer. The FT piece ends on this dour note:
[Y]oked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.
He might be right. Many bloggers/writers have wondered whether blogging is killing their writing and their more important studies. I've wondered about it, but I decided not to worry about it for a year or two, since blogging is uniquely situated to my station in life right now. As a father of seven young children, serious writing--though still in the works--is not highly feasible, since it requires long periods of intense work. The demand to earn money for my family makes those long periods scarce, and the emotional demands of my wife and children make the few long periods painful to take.
I'm not complaining, mind you. But I am saying there's one thing that the FT writer failed to take into account: blogging works for some writers, and for that reason, it will continue to exist.
