On media blogs, from one who does it

Eric Zorn, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, began posting items on the paper's site in August. He conferred with the Sacramento Bee's Dan Weintraub first, and worked out with his editors a similar arrangement to the Bee's at the time -- post simultaneously to the Web and to a Tribune editor. He argues that the Bee's change to make Weintraub post through an editor "robs it of its essential blogness."

What needs to emerge here if the j-blog isn't going to die at birth, is an understanding on the part of editors and readers that, procedurally, a blog is much more like an appearance on a TV panel program or talk-radio show than it is a fully sanctioned, completely vetted declaration in cold type.

My fellow columnists and I frequently appear on radio and television and offer live (and in many cases broadcast on the internet), unedited statements under the color of our publications. Several Tribune staffers even have their own radio shows. We give speeches. We respond to e-mail and letters in writing. We give interviews to the New York Times.

And almost never is the substance and wording of such communication approved in advance by minders or editors.

Papers that want to add the value of a blog to their websites (and I'd argue that, being opinions at heart, one blog is never enough for fairness and balance or intellectual diversity) are going to have to reconcile with this. [OR NOT: Matt Welch links to a New York Press item predicting that blogs will die within two years..."Blogging is not the new journalism. It’s the new zine."] Zorn adds:

Media consumers intuitively understand the difference between a published thought and one that's shouted at Bill O'Reilly. And they don't -- yet -- intuitively understand where a thought published on the web log fits into that spectrum.

Because we in the institutional media don't understand and can't agree on it yet.

There's my opening to mention that Atrios, a well-known liberal blogger who relishes dinging the right, tried to mock Bill O'Reilly by blogging all day in the Foxblabber's voice. It worked for awhile, but at 2:30 our time he finally gave up: "The strain of being O'Reilly was melting my brain."