Can Journos Blog?
Short answer: Absolutely.
The longer answer is something Time’s new China blog still seems to be searching for. I’m not going to join the China Law Blog’s call for a boycott just yet, mostly because I’d like to see the site turn into something useful.
I remember once, back in college, telling a friend that with AP stories (or other wires, for that matter) the writer almost disappeared. There was no sense of where the reporter stood in the story. I’m not talking about political perspectives or media biases. Please don’t start telling me how this or that outlet is plotting against your pet cause. It probably isn’t. What I mean is this:
Most wire stories are written so that you forget there was once a human sitting at a keyboard struggling to decide which turn of phrase captured a scene just right, or which quote to use from which source first, or what kind of fallout might come from the finished piece. The story becomes almost inhuman.
This is not a bad thing. News wires were created to funnel straight-forward, factual if somewhat dry, plain old news (though hopefully new news) to larger outlets who would use them to supplement their own coverage. That’s why most papers don’t usually run AP/Reuters/AFP on the front page.
The big dailies (I’m a fan of the NY and LA Times, among others) can get away from this because they have more breathing room. They can tell a story that does more than just get the facts out. I like to pick through a big Sunday feature and think about how long the reporter worked on that one piece, what questions she asked each source, where he was standing when the sniper targeted his embed unit. The reporter exists in the story, even if a personal pronoun is never used.
Blogging is a different animal entirely. As a medium, it is personal, transparent and interactive, three things that hardly ever describe a newspaper or magazine. Interactive is the big one. A blog post isn’t news written in the voice of God, it’s the start of a conversation from a guy with his picture in the sidebar.
I don’t think Time Magazine gets this. So far, Time’s China blog hasn’t said anything worth talking about. And as CLB pointed out, what they have said has generally been said elsewhere, and usually said a lot.
There’s nothing to interact with on Time’s blog. It reads like it was written by and for people who’ve never read another China blog.
Time’s blog in China seems an attempt to move magazine journalism onto a blog basically intact. To borrow from an earlier era, they’re sticking a Mac-formatted floppy into a Tandy machine. Or maybe into a CD drive.
The point is, blogging is different. It has a different style and voice and purpose. It’s not a transplanted magazine article or a set of news clippings, which is what Time’s blog has been so far, plus some vanilla observations.
I keep reading Time’s posts, hoping they get better, and asking myself: “What is this blog about?” Maybe it’s a policy blog. Maybe it’s a news round-up. Maybe it’s a noodle blog like this one. I don’t know if the writers there have come up with an answer, either.
I’m still figuring this all out. Six months ago I was writing daily stories about schools in the Antelope Valley, working for a paper that is dying slowly, whether the people there know it or not. Of the news outlets I’ve worked for, the one with the best website so far is the blog you’re reading now, and I’m not saying that with any sense of pride (OK, a little).
There are great China blogs written by journalists. What I like most about Richard Spencer’s and Tim Johnson’s blogs are that they talk about their reporting process and what it’s like being a writer in China. Time could do this, too. Or it could be a collecting point for all the news about China. Or each of its four writers could just pick a focus and stick to it.
Or it could keep doing what it’s been doing, and be ignored.
January 16th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Two things. One, my biggest fear is that it won’t be ignored; it will be read by China neophytes who are not reading anything else and they will start to view China as a cute place with things like its own hot toadies (yes, this was a post).
Second, maybe they are listening. There was actually a pretty decent post today on China’s environment. Nothing all that new in it, but it did stake out a real position and certainly if even half of the posts that preceded it were at this level, I would not have called for the boycott (to start in two weeks). It then followed it up with a picture of some trees wrapped in cloth, and the post said “another thing to like about Beijing,” so the jury is still out. But ….