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Thursday, October 23, 2003
The Third J 
| | Dan Gillmor calls it Journalism 3.0 (or 3.01b2). J.D. calls it New Media or Online Journalism (in his blog and day job roles). Yesterday I called it a kind of Third Way — neither cooly detached nor heatedly partisan, but rather engaged. I explained what I meant just enough to raise some good questions and answers from Jay Rosen. In "Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds.", he sees my one-liner and raises it by too many insights to count. Go read the post. It does a better job of explaining What We're Up To Here than anything else I've read about the subject. To get you started, here's a sample: |
| | Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they¹re opinion forming, but they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out, re-building it around new facts. Come to some conclusions? Put them in your weblog, man, but just remember: it doesn¹t want to conclude. |
| | People trying to explain their attraction to the weblog form say it¹s conversational, two way, personal, a medium for the individual voice — plus interactive with our untold wealth in information, and fun. All true. Doc adds something: weblogging is an inconclusive act — and that¹s attractive, part of the fun. |
| | The cool, neutral, professional style in journalism says: get both sides and decide for yourself. The hotter, more partisan press says: Decide for yourself — which side? — then go get information. The weblog doesn¹t want to be either of these, but it checks and balances both. |
| | Two key infrastructural facts make the weblog style possible. One is the boundless hyperlinked library called the Web, to which every blog adds something with every post. The other is syndication, which sends out notifications of every post, making back-and-forth more engaging than ever. |
| | One other fact is also significant, though it's hardly infrastructural; and that's the lack of deadlines and obligations to employers. This is the "amatuer" state Dave talks about, which in various ways applies even to professionals like Jay, J.D. Dan and myself. |
On the other wing...
| | But then you've got Boing Boing and Yours Truly, which both tend to avoid politics, except when lawmakers and regulators start screwing with technology, in which case we tend to lean on the Libertarian side. |
| | Or at least I do. Mostly I try only to express political opinions when I'm reasonably sure that they might be interesting and at least somewhat nonpredicable. At least that's what I like to think I do. Truth be told, I mostly write about stuff I think won't take too much time. |
| | Hey, I have a job to do. This isn't it. |
| | Anyway, Dana makes a bunch of well-sourced Good Points. Also some I disagree with, but I'll let them go for now, since it'll take time to pursue them and I'd rather sleep, frankly. I have a huge amount of real-job-type writing to catch up on today. |
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