My last metablogging post for a while

I know I’ve been blogging about blogging too much as of late — but I can’t resist these two links. The first is Fafblog’s “interview” with Wolf Blitzer. For those of you sick to death of the convention blogfest, this is the link for you. This is from the opening paragraph:

Here at the convention there isn’t that much to do right now other than eat tiny quiches an finger sammiches an hang out at panels drinkin wine but we’re still havin an ok time with that. Me an Giblets have been hangin out at such panels as “Blogging: Transforming the Medium of Media” an “Blogging: A Radical New Media of Blogging” an “Blogging: Blog Media Bloggity Blog Media Bla-blog” where we have lent our expert advice to confused broadcast journalists whose minds are dazzled by the oh so confusin world of computer wizardry.

It’s a damn good thing Henry and I changed our paper title, because our first choice was “Blogging: Blog Media Bloggity Blog Media Bla-blog.” More seriously, Jonathan Chait has a great TNR Online essay about why he’s covering the convention from home (alas, subscriber only free link for everyone!!). Chait makes a great point how and why the conventional wisdom among journalists about what makes great journalism is heavily skewed:

But what’s so bad about sitting around? You can learn a lot sitting behind a desk, mining the papers for interesting factual nuggets, reading political commentary from every perspective, poring through books and reports, and using the Nexis database to compile enormous stacks of newspaper stories. Most journalists scorn this kind of research because they’re obsessed with uncovering new facts, not synthesizing them…. Part of the problem is that journalism terminology glorifies “shoe-leather reporting,” whereby you pound the pavement so often you wear out the soles of your shoes. Yet there’s no widely used term of approbation for the other kind of reporting. For this very reason, my New Republic colleague Franklin Foer and I decided a few years ago to coin a phrase: ass-welt reporting. It means you’ve sat in your chair for so long reading books and documents that you’ve worn a welt the shape of your backside into your chair. I’m not saying that every news story could be reported without leaving one’s desk. (Bernstein: “Woodward, look! I found a clip from 1971 in which President Nixon tells the Omaha World-Herald he plans to order his goons to break into Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel!” Woodward: “I’ll cancel that meeting with Deep Throat.”) I’m simply saying that, sometimes, laziness can be the better part of valor.

Not only is this true, it’s the best refutation of Alex S. Jones’ tired tirade against bloggers. Jones complains that:

[B]loggers, with few exceptions, don’t add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.

The best bloggers link to opposing views, excel at Chait’s “ass-welt reporting,” and perform Google and Nexis searches ad nauseum. As Chait points out, reporting is about more than shoe leather, it’s about decent research skills — a fact one would have expected the director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy to comprehend. Instead, Jones seems to have divined all of his knowledge about blogs from reading Matt Drudge and Wonkette. It’s a shame he didn’t do more research for his op-ed. A BELATED POSTCRIPT: Many of the commenters to this post have defended either Drudge or Wonkette, assuming that I was attacking them. That wasn’t my intent, as I consume both of them on a regular basis. My point was that most bloggers do not provide the same type of content as either Cox or Drudge. Jones (or blog-grouch Tom MacPhail) would have had a leg to stand on if the rest of the blogosphere was akin to either of these sites. In moderation, however, both of them serve a useful purpose.