Journalists are worrywarts. We worry about toxins in the drinking water, graft at City Hall, opposition leaders in countries you've never heard of and the rotator cuffs of journeyman pitchers. We worry about greenhouse gasses, decorum in the Senate, childhood obesity, abandoned pets and the fall lineup on ABC. If there's an asteroid headed in our general direction, if too many Harvard students are making A's, if long-distance truckers aren't sleeping enough, we worry. When gas prices are low, we worry about SUVs smashing defenseless sedans. When gas prices are high, we worry about the effect of the SUV sales slump on GM's bottom line. We worry about floods when it rains and drought when the sun shines.
And still there is time to worry about ourselves. Journalists worry like mad about the fate of our own particular jobs. For more than 20 years, roughly since the dawn of the desktop computer, people have been telling us that micro-chips are going to put us in the soup kitchens. For a while, we could console ourselves with the fact that computers were heavy and had to be plugged into a wall. But now people get video on their portable phones, and . . . well, that's worrisome, if you're in the business of producing neatly folded stacks of dried wood pulp printed with columns of readable ink stains.
Readers may think we in the press are arrogant and out of touch, but that's just an act. Really we're sick with anxiety about the Death of Print. What began with the Gutenberg Bible often seems to be headed for an ignominious and fast-approaching end, around 2009, with the publication of the last printed work guaranteed to find a market: Mitch Albom's The Five Diets You'll Be on in Heaven.
Who's going to finish us off? Currently, we're worried about bloggers. Interlinked Internet diaries known as Web logs -- blogs -- are proliferating faster than nudies of Paris Hilton these days, from zero a decade ago to more than 10 million today. To date, no one has figured out how to make much money at blogging. The closest thing to a blog baron is a New Yorker named Nick Denton, who runs a chain of sites covering such topics as politics (Wonkette), celebrity gossip (Gawker and Defamer), gadgets (Gizmodo) and, most lucratively, porn (Fleshbot). An associate of Denton's was recently quoted as telling a journalism class that the company's writers earn a base annual salary of about $30,000, with bonuses for high traffic, and a company site is considered successful if it earns $75,000 in annual revenue. Most bloggers earn nothing from their blogs.
But that doesn't stop journalists from wringing our hands in countless articles about blogging, wiping our brows through endless panels devoted to blogging, scrying through bottomless poll data about blogging, and launching blogs of our own. If you are reading these words in a publication called The Washington Post Magazine, then the bloggers have not entirely overtaken the so-called mainstream media -- yet.
Most of these millions of Web logs are not concerned with news or politics. There are blogs about knitting and blogs about cooking and blogs about reading and blogs about computer engineering. There are military blogs and vegetarian blogs and Catholic blogs and birdwatching blogs. Gossip blogs, music blogs, Lindsay Lohan blogs, movie blogs, car blogs, history blogs, gardening blogs, fishing blogs. Blogs about football, basketball, baseball, NASCAR, hockey, boxing and ballet. Blogs about "The Apprentice," "Survivor" and "American Idol." People are blogging about dorm food, pregnancy, marriage and divorce.
If you think about it, that's a pretty fair sample of the interests of a well-rounded newspaper. Plus, the blog array offers an added bonus not found in family papers: sex blogs, covering such a range of kinks and appetites that Mr. Kinsey himself might have learned a thing or two from them.
"No one blog can cover everything . . . But one can envisage a blogosphere that readers rely on to obtain essentially everything they now get from a news-paper or a newscast," wrote Paul Mirengoff of the popular Power Line blog not long ago. "The basic facts of a story would come from links to news services. The analysis would come from specialized blogs or non-specialized blogs that happen to have expertise in the subject area. The op-ed type opinions would come from the opinion blogs . . .
"Thus, the blogosphere is likely to replace the MSM" -- that's mainstream media -- "for a growing number of consumers. Many others will continue to check out the MSM, but regard it much more skeptically (that is, take it much less seriously) than they have done in the past. It will be up to the MSM to decide whether it wishes to respond to these developments by undertaking radical change."
Radical change.
Sounds scary.
It also sounds a bit nasty, because the rules of discourse are different on the Internet -- another thing for journalists to wring our hands over. What's blogging doing to the tone of American politics? Suppose that the heat of political rhetoric could be charted on a scale of spicy foods. What you hear and read most days in the mainstream media ranges from unseasoned oatmeal to Franco-American Spaghetti-Os in a can. Whereas the political blogs pick up somewhere around a Taco Bell burrito and range all the way to the vindaloo you might be served by a sadist chef in Bangalore.
