Are We Scabs?
I think that there’s an interesting question that serious bloggers here have to ask. Are bloggers some new form of scab labor that busts unions? Clearly, this new form of media is starting to fill a void left by the traditional press. I think this void is very wide in smaller media markets where there isn’t enough money and interest to cover many vital areas like the arts and small neighborhood issues. I sort of think I am a scab and I’m ok with it. Bloggers have the potential to fill all kinds of niche gaps and call attention to things that can get lost without us.
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Nonsense. Maybe if you’re a newspaper unioner, but in reality, print media is the result of a very specific set of circumstances. They are the early version of democratized media but are so staid in their own traditions and restrictions that they no longer fulfill their purpose. Blogging, regardless of how one feels about the quality of writing, is the realization of a truly democratized media. There is nothing besides tradition that dictates only a select few should have the right to publish and unfortunately newspapers and other print media are going to have to find ways to stay alive despite that fact.
I obviously agree with that. The blunt fact is that in a town like Pittsburgh, it would be very hard to provide the kind of intense coverage that the town deserves with the kind of heavy cost stucture of traditional media.
The other major factor at work is that a lot of us bloggers have less to loose and are not as tied to the existing power structure and afraid. The bigger a company gets the more it has to be afraid of controversy and debate. The safe thing is to cover what everyone else covers.
It is fun to talk about ourselves like we are the future of talking on earth, but we are not scabs against newspapers. We do not serve the same purpose at all. It is like telling they guys who make abstract public art that they are taking jobs away from steelworkers.
The people who work at newspapers and other traditional media are trained in their field, work at it full time, and their professionalism leads to a degree of credibility. We have, nor should want, no such thing (except maybe the part where we would get paid). By choosing this arena we trade stature and expertise for freedom of action.
This is the reason why we link to articles in newspapers when we present our commentary on whatever crap we are pondering. Unaccountable amateurs will not take the place of credible professionals, and the only people who expect that are self-aggrandizing amateurs and insecure professionals.
I can’t fully agree with that at all. This blog for instance is part of a “chain” and is obviously trying to become self funding. It may one day even be able to pay it’s writers. I think there is a lot of profitable online media and some of it influential.
Also, limiting bloggers to being just commentators on existing media stories misses a lot of what they can do. In Pittsburgh, the amount of coverage given to a the arts does not come close to covering everything. So for a lot of stuff, this is all the coverage there will be.
By using the word “scab,” you’re deliberately striking a blow that jangles the funny bone of anybody who grew up in the Rust Belt (or, in my case, the Rust Belt and the Coal Belt). It brings to mind images of Old Man Steel and his armies of strike-busters.
That’s not what we’re doing.
Newspapers are an industry unto themselves, combining various writerly types from multiple disciplines into a cohesive whole that you can buy, read, and from there get a snapshot of life in the city (and/or the world).
Bloggers are a different animal altogether. Most blogs don’t offer a complete picture. As information sources fragment into niches, the bloggers follow - I used to write a rather successful blog about paranormal skepticism. Nobody went to my blog to read about Middle East politics.
I think Mac is right about one thing, though - journalism is a skillset that takes discipline and experience and education. Most bloggers aren’t journalists, we’re OpEd writers. I do disagree with Mac on one point, however - one does not need the edifice of the newspaper in order to read journalism. We’re seeing a shift from blogs as a means to an end (a job in a major media company) to an end of itself. I think it’s quite possible to read actual, good journalism that appears exclusively on the web, hammered out by lone, dedicated amateurs.
Are blogs just the zines of the information age? Or are they the continuation of the fragmentation of all media? Time will tell.
I’ll keep blogging, if I get paid or not.
I would not say that you have to be printed on pulp or broadcast on television to be a journalist: the internet is a perfectly acceptable place to perpetrate journalism. That is not, however, what we do here or what is done on weblogs in general. This technology is inclined towards conversation, like this one, not the gathering and organization of news and facts.
The Drudge Report is far more of a journalistic enterprise than a weblog is, even if it is a dishonestly exploitative example of it (like a Hearst paper, perhaps?).
Maybe the genesis of the weblog form is not properly looked for in the corresponding societies of the American revolution or the scientific and literary societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (now who’s being self-aggrandizing?), a form which allowed those who chose to join to gather reams of information and comment upon their favorite subjects.
We are not newspapers, nor network news, nor the internet replacement for those things. Even if we find a way to make a living from this and begin to write weblogs as we now do, but full time, we will still not be any of those things.
Now, if we were to get good at this, develop professional habits and reputations, band together, put someone in charge of standardizing style and making our reports skimmable, hired some people to sell advertising for us, and drew salaries, then we would be a newspaper. That is where newspapers came from in the first place.
But, even if all of this happens, we will not be scabs. Scabs, or “replacement workers” in the management euphemism that the proudly unionized writers of the Post-Gazette inexplicably use, are workers brought in to work cheap in the event of a strike, and in that way to keep the concern operating long enough to break the will of the strikers. If the writers of the P-G were to stage a walkout to protest the policies of the Block family and David Schribman called us up to come in and write the obits until Mackenzie Carpenter got hungry enough to come back to work, then we would be scabs.
If we become journalists who use a new medium to take readers away from newpapers, as I pie-in-sky imagined we might above, that is called “competition.”
I would also like to mention that OpEd (Opposite Editorial: the columns you see on the second-to-last page of the local section every day) is far from easy, and is far from what most of us do here most of the time.
If it were easy then David Schribman, who I mentioned above and am picking on because I don’t like him, would be good at it. He has been in the newspaper business since the days of the Yellow Kid and still has no idea how to make his column interesting. Week after week he reads and digests all the available information on a subject, calls to the fore all his considerable experience, and turns out a couple of hundred eye-crossingly boring words.
The point of OpEd columns, beside keeping one’s interest, are to discuss the important issues of the day. My last post was about how neat the Union Trust Building is. Alik’s was to encourage going to an art show. Carolyn’s was about how mean the guy at a coffee shop was to her. Liz’s was about a fundraiser where one eats soup. James’ was about a funny picture he took. John’s was about a post on another weblog. Laura’s was about how good Italian food is. Lindsay’s was about how best to get stuff while staying in a hotel. Mark’s was about another art show, not the same one Alik wrote about.
If the newspapers have anything to fear from us based on this, it is not the hard news reporters who should be shaking in their boots, nor the OpEd columnists, nor even the cute and fluffy features people. We might inspire some fear in the person who compiles the event listings, but I doubt it. Those are much better organized than our posts.
I don’t think I can agree with much of what you are saying. I think that what we are looking at is the emergence of a potentially very powerful medium and one that is likely create a whole new set of players. The operating rules and costs of major daily newspapers make them unlikey to be the winners in this game. When the conditions on the earth changed at the end of the dinosaur age, it would have been hard to guess who the new players would be. But, it was a safe bet that the dinosaurs would not be the winners.IBM did not become the biggest player in the age of the PC.
I don’t read most of the papers here daily, partly because they seem to rarely do serious investigative reporting. You get a lot of stuff that may be writen OK, but is just something, I could have heard about on the news, with little added. That has a lot to do with the cost of paying people union wages in a city with a poor economy.