Just blog standard offerings

This article appears in The Times today.

“BLOGGERS SHARE their work, argue with each other and add to a story dialectically. It’s why the blogosphere is now the most vital news source in America,” wrote Arianna Huffington, superstar blogger and socialite, this week.

Mrs Huffington has traced a long political journey from obscurantist Right to populist Left, but at no time has she deviated from enthusing for the fad du jour. Her latest is the notion that the internet — and specifically the type of online diary known as a weblog, or blog — has changed the way that news is gathered and reported. Whereas newspapers address readers impersonally, the blog “draws people in and includes them in the dialogue”.

This is largely nonsense. Similar claims for the transforming power of the internet were made when it was still known as the Information Superhighway. In practice, while the medium of delivery has changed, the content of newspapers remains the same. The online and print editions of this newspaper are almost identical. Internet evangelists believed electronic newspapers would be storehouses of information; in fact most people want not more information but more efficient ways of organising the information they are given.

What blogs do effectively is provide a vehicle for instant comment and opinion. Some newspapers have established blogs for their journalists or other commentators. But the overwhelming majority of blogs — no one knows how many there are — are set up by amateurs using software that is easily available and almost free.

These are not a new form of journalism, but new packaging for a venerable part of a newspaper. Even the best blogs are parasitic on what their practitioners contemptuously call the “mainstream media”. Without a story to comment on or an editorial to rubbish, they would have nothing to say.

Most blogs have nothing to say even then. Without editorial control, they are unconstrained by sense, proportion or grammar. Almost by definition, they are the preserve of those with time on their hands. Blogs have a few successes in harrying miscreant politicians or newspapers, but they are a vehicle for perpetuating myths as much as correcting them. In Mrs Huffington the preposterous term “blogosphere” has a worthy champion.