blog report

Blogs Report on Post Report on Blogs

October 12, 2005

The Washington Post tackles blogdom today with a front-page story examining the widespread use of the medium “to chronicle intensely personal experiences, venting confessions in front of millions of strangers who can write back.”

The Post reports that “Nearly half of bloggers consider it a form of therapy,” but cautions: “Although it may feel good to blog, psychologists warn that going public with private musings may have ramifications, and that little research has been done on the consequences of the Internet confessional.”

Consequences be damned, the print behemoth’s inspection of bloggers’ behavioral tendencies has produced lively responses from citizen Web scribes pouring out their innermost thoughts.

Hello World manages to hold his fire, writing, “Get ready for an influx of stories that amount to “hey, grandma — the whippersnappers have a new fad. They call it ‘Blogging’! To be fair, this one is actually pretty good. … [T]hey look beyond the mere existence of blogs and go on to consider both the purpose (at a level more complex than ‘it’s like a diary, but it’s on the Internet!’) and the value of it.”

But inevitably some scorn for the Post‘s treatment of the medium bubbles to the surface. “At any rate, it’s pretty lame that the Post didn’t leave the URLs for the blogs they looked at in the piece,” concludes Hello World. “What’s the point of talking about your blog if you can’t whore it out?”

Silly Seattle, who seems not to have read the entire thing, still joins in the fun: “The Washington Post completely misses the point of blogs in a column today. According [to] this pinhead, Yuki Nogichi, blogs are all about people having a catharsis. In reality, it’s mostly about people getting tired of crap in newspapers like the Washington Post.”

Sign up for CJR's daily email

One blogger, however, is tickled pink by the Post story. That would be Pamela Hilger, aka Just One Girl’s Head Noise, who was featured in the Post article, something she could not have dreamed of two years ago when she began her intimate online journal. Acknowledging the slight risk inherent in blogging, she shares her excitement:

[W]hen the reporter … a REAL reporter from the Washington Post called me and interviewed me … it was killing me that I had to keep it a secret …

[A]nd then yesterday I finally received an email from Ms. Noguchi letting me know that her article is appearing on the front page !!!

But honesty comes in many forms, as Xanthippas at Three Wise Men reveals in a confession about the more primal urge behind his blogging: “[F]or me, blogging is a fairly personal exercise in venting my liberal rage upon the largely unsuspecting and uncaring world, but I don’t think I’d call it a therapeutic exercise of any kind.”

As for venting, some tech hotshot got his (or hers) by hacking into Andrew Sullivan’s Web site. “[S]orry i hacked you” read a scrolling red banner at the top of the briefly (and sparsely) redesigned site, left with pride by one “revie_perish.” Sullivan, a veteran print journalist and blogger, has since wrested back control, writing, “I have my suspects. Just kidding.”

But the bad news for full-time print journalists keeps on coming, with the news of a drop in Gannett’s third-quarter earnings, and a Minneapolis Star Tribune article reporting that “the average age of a newspaper reader is now 55.” Calling the Strib piece “the 21st Century equivalent of a horse and buggy trade magazine reporting on the rise of the Model T,” Kennedy v. The Machine chimed in with these inspiring words late yesterday: “Of course it would be incomplete to say that newspapers will go completely the way of the dinosaur. Like Bird Flu jumping from fowl to humans, the medium will survive as it mutates to a digital format.” (Now, where else are you going to get a scribe who can effortlessly compare newspapers to horse-drawn buggys and a lethal pandemic, all in the same thought?)

In a big effort to stem the tide, the Strib rolls out a much-anticipated redesign of both its newspaper and Web site today.

Here’s an easier solution for newspapers’ troubles: More articles about blogs. Guaranteed to bring readers in droves.

–Edward B. Colby

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.