kEnnEdy | PoliTiCAl BlogS 183political Blogs: Teaching Us Lessons
About CommunityDan Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern uni-
versity, writes on media issues for The Guardian and for CommonWealth
magazine. His blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net.
■ ■ ■DAN KeNNeDyT
he rise of blogging as both a supplement and a challenge to tradi-
tional journalism has coincided with an explosion of opinion mon-
gering. Blogs — and the role they play in how Americans consume and
respond to information — are increasingly visible during our political
season, when our ideological divide is most apparent. From nakedly
partisan sites such as Daily Kos on the left and Little Green Footballs
on the right, to more nuanced but nevertheless ideological enterprises
such as Talking Points Memo, it sometimes seems there is no room in
blogworld for straight, neutral journalism.
The usual reasons given for this are that reporting is difficult and
expensive and that few bloggers know how to research a story, develop
and interview sources, and assemble the pieces into a coherent, factual
narrative. Far easier, so this line of thinking goes, for bloggers to sit in
their pajamas and blast their semi-informed opinions out to the world.
There is some truth to this, although embracing this view whole-
heartedly requires us to overlook the many journalists who are now
writing blogs, as well as the many bloggers who are producing journal-
ism to a greater or lesser degree. But we make a mistake when we look
at the opinion-oriented nature of blogs and ask whether bloggers are
capable of being “objective,” to use a hoary and now all but meaningless
word. The better question to ask is why opinion-oriented blogs are so
popular — and what lessons the traditional media can learn from them
without giving up their journalistic souls.
Perhaps what’s happening is that the best and more popular blogs
provide a sense of community that used to be the lifeblood of tradi-
tional news organizations and, especially, of newspapers. recently I
reread part of Jay rosen’s book, What Are Journalists For?, his 1999
postmortem on the public journalism movement. What struck me
was rosen’s description of public journalism’s origins, which were
grounded in an attempt to recreate a sense of community so that peo-
ple might discover a reason to read newspapers. “eventually I came to
the conclusion... that journalism’s purpose was to see the public into
fuller existence,” rosen writes. “Informing people followed that.”123407_GRE_5344_Ch7_151_210.indd 183 11/19/14 1:59 PM