The blogging story

Writing for an audience that is not primarily other bloggers, and some who don't visit many websites of any kind, I get a lot of questions about the form and its origins. I have a new best place to send them for answers: this piece by Matt Welch in the latest Columbia Journalism Review. He traces the blog explosion with a thoughtful take on what these sites have to do with journalism.

Besides introducing valuable new sources of information to readers, these sites are also forcing their proprietors to act like journalists: choosing stories, judging the credibility of sources, writing headlines, taking pictures, developing prose styles, dealing with readers, building audience, weighing libel considerations, and occasionally conducting informed investigations on their own.

Thousands of amateurs are learning how we do our work, becoming in the process more sophisticated readers and sharper critics. For lazy columnists and defensive gatekeepers, it can seem as if the hounds from a mediocre hell have been unleashed. But for curious professionals, it is a marvelous opportunity and entertaining spectacle; they discover what the audience finds important and encounter specialists who can rip apart the work of many a generalist.

Welch, co-founder of the apparently defunct L.A. Examiner.com, is an advocate of the form and says on his own website that the CJR story is "an attempt to persuade skeptics that this is indeed an interesting phenomenon." But the piece is solid, and he notes at one point: "...Which is not to say that 90 percent of news-related blogs aren't crap."