Navelgazing
I’ve often wondered whether it would be an enjoyable experience to sit in a room full of my peers and listen to their thoughts on writing. Blogging and journalism – both of which I do – are fairly solitary arts and it’s all too easy to never have any contact with others outside the realm of a press conference or sniping in an internet forum. I’ve often wondered what they look like, do they actually resemble characters from V for Vendetta or just ex middle managers from the Home Office?
On Monday my curiousity got the better of me and I went to an event called “What Difference Does Political Blogging Really Make? This was actually a panel discussion in a pub, featuring some of the UK’s best-known bloggers and Guardian journo Nick Cohen. The room was largely full of Westminster apparatchiks and political bloggers (what would the collective noun for that be? A cackle of bloggers? A sycophancy of spin doctors?). I had reservations about the event beforehand but actually it was a very interesting discussion. I thought I would share some of (what were to me) the highlights of the discussion.
In focussing subjectively on the most interesting points of those on the panel (interesting according to me) I am well aware that I am misrepresenting the overall tone and ful-breadth of subjects of their debate. I can only hold up my hands to this – I was not taking minutes but wilfully zoning in and out of a debate according to what personally interested me. If a transcript of the debate exists I will happily link to it.
Nick Cohen began by raising the issue that a lot of blogs are not doing investigative work and largely stick to voicing personal viewpoints (of various levels of erudition) instead. He said part of the issue was that bloggers don’t make any real money and investigative research takes time: “I don’t see any great investigation because you have to pay people to do that” – in other words it’s much easier to spout off than do your research because proper research requires using large amounts of your personal time for the love of it.
I would have to agree with this. However, it is a trend that the papers are falling into as well – and I say this from personal experience. I recently sold an investigative story which was remarkably simple in its premise – all the information was publicly available and I couldn’t believe no one had thought of it before. Turned out no one had because everyone else just didn’t have as much time on their hands to spend pursuing small details as I did (or they had a life – one of the two).
Cohen also believed there was a lack of regional blogs and that political blogging was generally Westminster biased – I would dispute this. I read a lot of excellent regional blogs (or blogs which are written regionally). The presence of Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole on the panel was a good rebuttal to this.
Fealty raised the issue that there are “a lot of bloggers that are intent on bringing things down” but hardly any bloggers who are setting an agenda for positive action.
I would agree with this – but again, the accentuating of the negative is not unique to blogging. Negativity sells. A lot of people buy the morning paper purely because they like to get a sense of outrage alongside their cereal. The media is openly guilty of gloomy misrepresentation (for an excellent investigation of this I really recommend Risk by Canadian journalist Dan Gardner). When you work as a journalist you are constantly under pressure to hone in on the scandal, the eye-popping statistics, the one negative sentence in the report. Bloggers are merely reflecting the rest of the media – following the trend rather than bucking it.
Fealty thought that “bloggers prize dissent”, whereas “journalists hunt in packs”. As someone who occupies both sides of the
fence I would say I haven’t seen much evidence of this – papers are always on the desperate quest for an exclusive. The real difference is that blogs represent a wider community of narrower interests whereas most papers occupy the middle ground like the main political parties. As Fealty said, bloggers aren’t talking to the masses but to a “differentiated audience”. Every blogger writes to an agenda or a particular audience – only that audience may be more niche or extreme than that of a newspaper so therefore the difference from blog-to-blog is greater than that from newspaper-to-newspaper.
Fealty praised bloggers for having forced “a greater transparency by questioning things”. We only have to look to the Trafigura Case for evidence that this is true. In a way, that is an example of bloggers “hunting in packs” to great effect. Strangely, Trafigura almost found a new role for bloggers, not as ‘the new journalists’ but rather as ‘the new Private Eye’. A chief function of Private Eye has always been as a testing ground for the papers for potentially litigious subjects. There’s a part of me that will be extremely sad if the rigour and expertise of Private Eye is lost to the blogosphere and the word-of-mouth activism of the social networking sites but maybe that’s just a sign of the times which I need to learn to live with.
Panellist Jonathan Isaby would probably disagree with me on this (now there’s a sentence I never thought I would write). Having left professional journalism to run Conservative Home he cited the fact that newspapers are now encouraging all their reporters to become “bloggers” (diversification or a sneaky way of getting them to “write more” for the same salary? You decide…). The fall in circulation of the print media and the rising number of blogs are testament to this. Isaby says that more Tory MPs read blogs than newspapers.
He thinks blogs are a sign of democratisation – they enable talented people to get stuff out there without having the barriers of entry that existed before. There’s a flip side to this – blogs don’t make much money, if any. The financial reward for talent is less (this is across the board with music, art and entertainment suffering equally). Yes journalism is dominated by the middle classes (as are all professions) – it’s a career I only broke into several years after leaving university – largely because I couldn’t afford to do a lengthy internship after leaving university because I was too poor and saddled with too much debt. However, with the rise of free media it will probably become even more impossible for people like me to break into the media because they need to work for money to survive.
Panellist Guido Fawkes is one of the few bloggers who does make money from it. He freely admits that he unashamedly writes “for the Westminster bubble”. Like Isaby, he voiced the belief that blogs are a welcome democratisation and a sign of the times: “We don’t need a parliamentary reporter because we all have access to Hansard”. I haven’t seen much analysis of Hansard so far but I hope that in future there will be more investigatory work online in the blogs – I dream of part-time bloggers uncovering a big story in the vein of John Le Carre’s A Constant Gardener (only hopefully without the tragic ending…) – whatever gets a difficult and important story into the public realm at the end of the day is good and the newspapers are limited by affiliation and editorial agenda (as you are in any job where you have a ‘boss’).
Finally, Sunny Hundal of Liberal Conspiracy made an interesting point. He sees Liberal Conspiracy as one of the many blogs which focuses on movement politics – their aim is “to bring the left together to destroy the right”. This is something which no paper or television news programme can do – offer a level forum for debate and sharing ideas and energise a base. Not all blogs seek to do this obviously but those that do are creating a new and exciting media.
A comment piece like this would never see the light of day in a newspaper. Not because newspapers are elitist but because they have a limited remit. A blog can be anything the creators want it to be. That’s what makes blogs different and that’s what makes political blogging important.
