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Yes, but it's a deep navel.

Salon.com Technology | The new blogocracy

Cheerblogger Danah Boyd goes long with a piece in Salon (reg required, sorry):

The tendency of bloggers to talk about blogging is often criticized, yet this practice of self-reflection is precisely what makes blogging a valuable contribution to public discourse. Bloggers are highly critical, questioning creatures. Whatever their subject, they document their observations and examine them inquisitively.

If only they were at all highly critical and questioning re: themselves rather than everyone else, you might get some agreement about this from me. But given that the convention blogging I've seen so far has shaken out pretty much exactly as I suspected, I call bullshit on this.

I expected that the better-known political bloggers - Atrios, Josh Marshall, Kos - would have interesting things to say. The rest haven't done much of anything (Did you know that the press gets advance copies of speeches? The convention is boring! Look, there's Tom Brokaw! You had to go to Boston to figure this out?) and already are making excuses for the utter banality of their "coverage". If this is citizens' media, I'll take the elites' offering, thanks.

Posted by John on July 28, 2004 1:18 PM |

Comments

Of for God's sake...

Over two decades, Theodore White wrote some excellent rundowns of life at the conventions. His "Making of the President" books for 1960 and 1964 were gripping accounts. The story of Goldwater running roughshod over his party while its moderates tried in vain to beat him back is some of the best political writing I've ever enjoyed. The drama is there. These clowns just don't know how to find it, and don't have the real credentials to get anywhere near it.

They can rationalize that to doomsday, but why they expect they'll be any better at hobby blogging the convention than a political reporter would be at their day jobs is beyond me. The most they're going to manage is a Thompsonian "crazed outsider" schtick that'll be tired before their first use of the words "strange and terrible."

I'm calling bullshit, too. What a bunch of arrogant twits.

Josh Marshall nailed it. [1]

And, I suppose, I should point out, here's a real reporter using the blog format, in case someone wants to take exception to my dismissal of Dave Winer's value in the context of the convention[2]: You don't have to follow b!X for long to realize he's living a reporter's life, doing the hard work of getting to meetings and talking to people and slowly accreting the sort of contacts and memory a good reporter needs. If that's citizen's media, I want more.

The rest of them can get bent.

[1] http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_07_25.php#003204
[2] http://communique.portland.or.us

Posted by: Michael Hall | July 28, 2004 1:43 PM