TRANSFORMERS, MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE?:

Nothing New Under the Web (Jonah Goldberg, October/November 2002, American Enterprise)

The only thing growing faster than blogs is the hype over blogs. Bloggers talk about an ever-expanding "blogosphere" which will transform the way ideas and news are disseminated and consumed. Because a lot of journalists and academics spend a scandalously large fraction of their time surfing the Internet, and because bloggers tend to inflate the importance of established journalists--even when they are criticizing them--the mainstream media has largely fallen for the story. Newsweek, for example, recently asked "Will the Blogs Kill Old Media?"

The answer, of course, is no.

The most successful blogs--at least in the world of politics--are either produced by long-established writers like Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, or they are
associated with major publications like National Review, the Wall Street Journal, or the American Prospect.

Should the marketplace show its appreciation by generating significant revenue for a blogger, you know what will happen? A big newspaper or magazine will offer him or her a job. That's why McDonald's sells fajitas now. And that's why bloggers aren't going to put serious media publications out of business.

Mr. Goldberg pulls a rather misleading bait-and-switch here. He starts out by, I think accurately, saying that many bloggers believe that they are part of a phenomenon that could "transform the way ideas and news are disseminated and consumed". He then seems to implicitly acknowledge that they have in fact effected such a transformation already: " [A] lot of journalists and academics spend a scandalously large fraction of their time surfing the Internet". And, as he notes, even he writes for a blog at National Review. Now, I don't know the circulation figures for the print edition of National Review, nor how many site visits they get a day, but we have to assume the second number is at least a factor of ten higher than the first. And from everything we've seen in various arguments between The American Prospect and other folks, it seems likely that The Corner, the blog at National Review, is probably the most popular feature at the site. So, if we consider opinion journalism for a moment only in terms of the impact it may have on public opinion, then Mr. Goldberg must be said to write primarily for the Web, even for the blog. His stuff just happens to get put on paper, for which he gets paid. Ask yourself a simple question: would Mr. Goldberg's influence (regardless of how much or how little that may be) on the national conversation be appreciably diminished if the magazine stopped printing his writings but continued to publish him at the website?
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 15, 2002 12:56 PM