This week, I attended a Brookings Institution event on The Impact of New Media. It basically covered how blogs were changing the landscape of journalism. This is kind of a tired discussion. I mean, when I went to SXSW in 2002, this was already a 'hot topic,' even then. The fact that the Brookings Institution is now holding panel discussions on the subject, and bloggers are now appearing on the cover of the New York Times magazine is a sure sign that blogging has moved into the mainstream, and that it will soon degrade into some over-commercialized craze. (Or perhaps it already has.)

Despite the fact that the discussion of the new media's effect on journalism has been going on for some time now, the Brookings Institution panel discussion was quite good and EJ Dionne did an excellent job moderating, I thought.

What interests me about blogging isn't so much the 'journalism' aspect in the 'professional' sense, but the 'journal' aspect in the 'personal reflection' sense. I've never really thought of blogs as hard-hitting, investigative journalism. This isn't meant to be critical or negative of blogs, I just don't think this is what the medium is about. I would still read a newspaper if I wanted hard news. But I see blogs as playing a key role in forming a new kind of journalism - a 'grassroots' sort of journalism where you learn about a situation not through the filter of some large corporate news source, but through personal perspectives and observations. Mostly, I don't look to blogs for news at all. My favorite blogs are simply commentaries on one's own life, not on current events. But that aspect of blogging is often overlooked or considered 'uninteresting' in panel discussions.

New Media 'celebrities' (yes, we have new media celebrities, now) Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) and Andrew Sullivan (Daily Dish) had some interesting comments on the subject of blogging as journalism (or not). You can read the full text of the discussion here (PDF). But here were a couple of excerpts I thought were particularly good:

MR. SULLIVAN:
I really think part of this medium is about conversation. It's not about a monologue. It really is -- and the best blogs to me are those which directly interact with or listen to the people who are reading you and come back to them. It's a very creative -- if you let it be creative. You have to let go a little bit, and then you won't have to think out loud and not be afraid to say things you may later regret or want to reconsider. That creates a kind of, a new -- I think it's a new literary genre, myself, I really do. I think it's beginning to emerge, a kind of way of writing that is neither prose in the old sense nor is it journalism in the old sense nor is it talk radio. It's somewhere between the op-ed page and talk radio. That's where it is. It hovers in between the two.

I completely agree with Sullivan's characterization of blogging as a 'new literary genre,' but I'd take it even further and say that instead of hovering between 'op-ed and talk radio' it actually hovers between 'op-ed' and 'journal' or 'diary.' To me, what is so fascinating about blogs is that they are a window into somebody's personal thoughts and reflections. The idea of the 'journal' is nothing new, and there's a whole branch of English lit academics dedicated to studying journal-writing. But it's interesting to me how the idea of the 'personal journal' has morphed as it has moved online to become 'public journal.' I believe that to some degree every writer is always writing to an audience, even those who keep their prose well hidden in a notebook tucked away in their bedroom drawer. One day, perhaps after they're no longer on this earth, they secretly know somebody is going to read what they've written. But the old-fashioned journal is definitely more of a 'private' thing. The difference with blogs, is that the 'secret-ness' is removed. From day one, anything written on one's blog, no matter how personal, is made public to the entire world. It's interesting how this might change the shape and tone of what one writes. Some people still write shockingly personal things about their life. Others, keep it more about current events. Either way, the medium is much different than anything before it.

In the discussion, Sullivan went on to talk about how blogs can help us understand current events in ways newspapers can not:

MR. SULLIVAN:
There is a whole bunch of very orthodox Catholics that blog, whom I read when I want to figure out this stuff. There isn't a page in the New York Times where I can find that.

Cox took the idea a little further:

MS. COX:
I think that's a really good way to look at blogging, which is like--or to look at--there's a news event and there are aspects of it that are best covered by newspapers, aspects of it that are best covered by other media. And in addition to what Andrew's saying about the idea of, like, getting a feel for what the arguments are on each ideological side of an issue, I also think blogs are really good--I mean, this is sort of maybe just an extension of that, the Schiavo case in particular. Because blogging is so personal, you get a lot of, like, personal history kind of -- people talking about their own experiences in these kinds of situations. And whether you want to hear it or not, I mean, like, that's part of the story. And so that's what blogs also are good for, like people --

Great stuff!

One of the highlights of the panel discussion was when Gary Mitchell of 'The Mitchell Report' asked: "When is what appears in the blogosphere journalism, and when isn't it?" He posed it mainly to Cox and Sullivan. Both of them basically responded that they thought making the distinction between the two was of little use. Cox clarified that the question might be useful in terms of revealing sources, which has become an issue lately with the Apple case. Sullivan simply said, 'I think it's not an interesting question.' He went on to say that blogging is about people 'writing about the world.'

Quite.

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