Going pro

It’s time to blog about bloggers blogging about blogging!  Let’s start with <a href=”http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909u/professional-bloggers”>Benjamin Carlson’s recent account</a> of “the rise of the professional blogger”:

<blockquote>In early July, Laura McKenna, a widely respected and longtime blogger, <a href=”http://www.apt11d.com/2009/07/the-blogosphere-20.html”>argued on her site, 11D</a>, that blogging has perceptibly changed over the six years she’s been at it. Many of blogging’s heavy hitters, she observed, have ended up “absorbed into some other professional enterprise.” Meanwhile, newer or lesser-known bloggers aren’t getting the kind of links and attention they used to, which means that “good stuff” is no longer “bubbling to the top.” Her post prompted a couple of the medium’s most legendary, best-established hands to react: Matthew Yglesias (formerly of <i>The Atlantic</i>, now of ThinkProgress), confirmed that blogging has indeed become “institutionalized,” and Ezra Klein (formerly of <i>The American Prospect</i>, now of <i>The Washington Post</i>) concurred, “The place has professionalized.” </blockquote>

This confirms what I’ve been hearing from people like <a href=”http://maudnewton.com/blog/index.php”>Maud Newton</a> (whom I met last spring) and <a href=”http://fauxrealtho.com/”>Lauren Bruce</a> (whom I met last week while sightseeing in West Lafayette, Indiana).  Because of course, when I meet bloggers in real life, we take the opportunity to talk about blogging.  (Well, actually Maud and I were <i>supposed</i> to do that — it was a forum at Penn State on blogging and the arts.)  Note, by the bye, that all three of these bloggers are (1) widely respected, (2) longtime bloggers (Lauren, of course, invented blogging in 1985), and (3) women.  So of course we have to ask them: where were all the women bloggers?

Sorry.  Did I take you back for a moment?  Ah, 2004.  Bad times.  How bad, you ask?  Really, really bad.  Why, back in September of that year, <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/blogging_has_sold_out_and_nobody_told_me/”>blogging sold out and became corporate</a>.

Anyway, a couple of thoughts on the consolidation-and-professionalization of the blogosphere since its last sellout.  First, Laura’s.  This is point 3 of nine (Laura would have had an even ten but for blogger burnout):

<blockquote><b>3. Norms and practices.</b> Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to.  It’s a lot of work to look for good posts elsewhere, and most bloggers have become burnt out. Drezner and Farrell had a theory that even small potato bloggers would have their day in the sun, if they wrote something so great that it garnered the attention of the big guys. But the big guys are too burnt out to find the hidden gems. So, good stuff is being written all the time, and it isn’t bubbling to the top.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Many have stopped using blogrolls, which means less love spread around the blogosphere. The politics of who should be on a blogroll was too much of a pain, so bloggers just deleted the whole thing. </blockquote>

Now, mine.

<b>Thing the first.</b> You knew this would happen eventually, right?  Check out Laura’s point four, about blogger burnout.  I said pretty much the same thing when I folded my own blog in early 2007 — it’s just too much work.  Yes, I restarted Ye Olde Blog about a year ago, but it’s nowhere near the scale of what I was doing in 2005-06, and it has about one-quarter the readership of those heady days.  Which is, I think, just about right — i.e., manageable.

<b>Thing the second</b>, which follows from thing the first as the night the day.  Group blogs were always the way to go, because successful solo blogs are so difficult to maintain over many years.  Crooked Timber was simply way ahead of the curve.

<b>Thing the third</b>, it’s hard not to succumb to Blog Nostalgia in all this — for the wild and wooly days of the Rittenhouse Review (pbuh) and Steve Gilliard (pbuh) and Respectful of Otters and Fafblog’s interview with James Dobson, back when people wondered if Atrios was really Sidney Blumenthal, back when it was genuinely surprising that a major American political party would issue press credentials to bloggers attending its national convention. You know, back when blogging was cool, before it totally sold out and went mainstream.  Which brings me to

<b>Thing the fourth</b>.  Well, of <i>course</i> Crooked Timber was cooler before I showed up here.  Don’t think I don’t know that.  But I liked Hüsker Dü before you did, so there.

<b>Thing the fifth</b>.  Laura doesn’t mention this, but it came up in my conversations with Maud and Lauren: in the absence of the Koufax Awards, there really is no formal mechanism for bringing lesser-known bloggers to the attention of Liberal and Leftish Bloggers Everywhere. But:

<b>Thing the sixth</b>.  The demise of the Koufaxes is symptom, not cause: they started back in aught-two as a compensatory mechanism, as left-throwing bloggers huddled around the virtual oil can in fingerless gloves and lamented the fact that all the blogging awards, like the young blogosphere itself, were dominated by conservatives and glassy-eyed techno-utopian libertarians.  For the next couple of years, the Koufaxes were something like a big ol’ barbeque where you might meet people like Lindsay Beyerstein or Scott Lemieux hanging out by the keg.  By 2006, though, as the barbeque had to be moved to the football stadium, Dwight Meredith’s idea had gotten too big to manage.  (Here’s <a href=”http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/12/fame_and_fortun.html”>Meteor Blades</a> talking up the Koufaxes in late 2005 — for what would turn out to be the final year of the event.  And personally, I still have blog nostalgia for the <a href=”http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002468.html”>Cobb Awards</a>.  Could those have lasted more than one year?  Sadly, no.)

On the other hand, Open Pajamas Source Media.

<b>Thing the seventh</b>.  Wait a minute, <a href=”http://thegspot.typepad.com/”>Kathy G.</a> and <a href=”http://jonswift.blogspot.com/”>Jon Swift</a> are no longer blogging?  You say they haven’t been blogging in <i>months</i> now?  But they just started!

<b>Thing the eighth</b>.  Back to Benjamin Carlson’s essay:

<blockquote>Of the top 50 blogs, 21 are owned by such familiar names as CNN, the New York Times, ABC, and AOL.</blockquote>

Well, the “political economy” media theorists were right about that — the Internet gets commercial, the big guys move in, and the weird turn pro.  But look again at the very tippy top of Carlson’s piece, where the teaser reads,

<blockquote><i>The blogosphere was supposed to democratize publishing and empower the little guy. Turns out, the big blogs are all run by The Man.</i></blockquote>

Ah, no, not exactly.  For one thing, the top-50 glass is still 58 percent full.  Apparently only 42 percent of the big blogs are Man-run.  Which is kind of remarkable, really, after seven-eight-nine years.  For another thing, the blogosphere certainly <i>did</i> democratize publishing, and it still does.  Why, you could start a blog right now!  Let’s not confuse the question of whether the blogosphere is a democratic medium with the question of how the structure of the blogosphere has changed over the decade, because that would be one of those blog-category mistakes.

Well, that’s all I have for now.  I’d come up with nine things, but I’m feeling blogger burnout.  Also, that’s AOL on the other line — gotta go!