on the Ego Necessary for Blogging (Marc Ambinder)
Really good print journalism is ego-free. By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective. What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening. Blogging is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view. There is nothing wrong with this. As much as a writer can fabricate a detachment, or a “view from nowhere,” as Jay Rosen has put it, the writer can also also fabricate a view from somewhere. You can’t really be a reporter without it. I don’t care whether people know how I feel about particular political issues; it’s no secret where I stand on gay marriage, or on the science of climate change, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called “Marc Ambinder” that people read because it’s “Marc Ambinder,” rather than because it’s good or interesting.
–Marc Ambinder
from I Am a Blogger No Longer (The Atlantic)
Themocracy
I love this, this total revision of the history of journalism, ignoring how it was a really really short period in which Journalism adopted this pretense. Ha!
“revision” seems a bit harsh… as I read it, Ambinder is talking about the dynamics of blogging and what most people (wrongly) think journalism is NOW and what most journalists (sometimes rightly) think it should be, not positing a long view of journalism in the historical context.
What’s interesting to me is that the much more readily apparent egocentric nature of “blogging” is a sharp edge that cuts both ways…. it’s both the great strength– the humanism that informs it and the accretion that comes to form a lumpy whole– and the great weakness– the expectation, ironically, that bloggers must, each time they post, be giving answers and making arguments rather than exploring…