The first time I heard the word “blog” was from Flyer
colleague Chris Davis, who at some point back in the early 2000s used
the term in a conversation we were having about websites in general,
including one I was then doing some serious labor on. The next time the
concept — of 24/7 online “Web logs” (aka blogs) — really
snagged my consciousness came in late 2002 when I learned of one based
on a variant of my name.
This was the famous, or infamous, or, in any case, now defunct
“HalfBakered” operated by one Mike Hollihan, who currently holds forth
as online editor of the locally produced Main Street Journal, a
print periodical aimed at a conservative audience.
HalfBakered was so called because Hollihan had convinced
himself that journalism — even, or maybe especially,
alternative journalism — was a liberal scam and that I, as
someone who focused on politics, was the local scammer-in-chief.
That characterization was as flattering as it was faulty, depending
on misapprehensions and misprisions of various kinds — ranging
from Hollihan’s chastising me for allegedly ignoring a then-raging
story, one that I had in fact broken, to his epiphany that my having
quoted Woodrow Wilson’s phrase “open covenants openly arrived at”
denoted my membership in a dark and demonic international
conspiracy.
The transition to more or less traditional journalism has improved
Hollihan in some ways, cramped his style in others. In any case, even
in his blogging days, he found enough real acorns (all of us should be
thankful he discovered assorted other at-large subjects to write about)
that by 2004 I found myself becoming a fan, at one point touting
Hollihan’s erratically appearing on-again/off-again site as “Best
Temporarily Out-of-Commission Weblog.”
In 2005, by now acquainted with a plethora of blogs (and a sometime
contributor to one myself), I wrote a column in which I hazarded this
description: “The blog is the bastard child of the conventional website
and the chatroom, blending the focus of the former with the masquerade
party of the latter. Add a dash of group therapy and a jigger of trick
or treat, and you’ve got it.”
Actually, you don’t. And I didn’t. As both the print and broadcast
versions of conventional journalism increasingly find themselves
stranded somewhere between hospice and Death Valley, the blog as a
genre has become something infinitely more substantial. And not just
because staff-written blogs of one kind or another are by now staples
of all journalistic enterprises (including the Flyer). The best
action is still outside the house.
Outrageous opinion remains a staple of the independent blog. But
more and more it is bloggers of that sort who are breaking news —
looking into corners or under rocks while big-city dailies are cutting
staff, contriving circulation-builders that don’t work, and trying to
cover politics and government by passing along press releases.
On the score of blogger effectiveness, just ask Tennessee
gubernatorial candidate Roy Herron, a Democratic state senator whose
dissembling and back-and-forthing on a legislative resolution opposing
the federal Employee Free Choice Act was exposed by several attentive
bloggers acting in concert. Maybe it was this embarrassment that
prompted Herron to redeem himself with progressives by salvaging an
endangered paper-ballot initiative. D’ya think?
Ask Republican state senator Diane Black about the furor, stretching
all the way to CNN, that erupted when one of her staffers was exposed
by blogger Newscoma as the sender of an e-mailed “portrait of the
presidents” depicting 43 presidents as usual and the 44th, Barack
Obama, as a pair of goggle eyes in black space.
Or behold, for that matter, an infinite number of blogger-caused
turnarounds on the national scene — ranging from Dan Rather’s
firing to the outing of page-molesting congressman Mark Foley to this
year’s valiant last-ditch stand against Graham-Lieberman, which
convinced Obama to seek the exclusion of that media-muzzling mechanism
from an omnibus military funding bill.
And well under way is the latest phase of the citizen media’s war
against secrecy: Twitter — the instant-by-instant networking of
pared-down word capsules expressing everything from the fact that a
given sender is brushing his teeth to the best means of evading
secret-police units in Iran.
“Tweeting” the process is called. Don’t get me started!
Too late. I already have.
Jackson Baker is a Flyer
senior editor.
