To blog or not to blog?

Ask Sinéad Gleeson why she loves blogging, and she uses the word “unfettered”. A journalist who won the best arts and culture blog at the Irish Blog Awards back in March this year, she enjoys the freedom: no sub-editor, no word count, no editorial line, no deadlines.
“As a freelancer, I cover the arts. With the blog, if I want to talk about Roy Keane, I will,” she says. Awards organiser Damien Mulley started blogging four years ago to get his thoughts on a page. Sarah Carey got into it for similar reasons. Having focused on the news of the day in her blogs, she now writes a column for the Sunday Times.
If blogging is simply writing about what’s on your mind (“It beats yelling at the television,” explained US blogger Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit), why should the mainstream media regard it as important?
This is only one aspect of the appeal, however. The immediacy of publishing and the infectious nature of instant online debate are other attractions. Roger Galligan of Irishblogs.ie, says a new blog is added to the site every six hours. There are over 1,500 bloggers registered with Irishblogs.ie, with some sites receiving up to 2,000 visitors a day. It looks as if the mainstream media is going to have to sit up and take notice.
There are sceptical voices. Self-described “Luddite” John Waters argues that the excitement surrounding blogging comes mainly from journalists or political groupies, an atypical sample of society. These assume, Waters argues, that media are consumed by people continually, whereas most people use the media in a controlled manner. “There’s a disproportionate emphasis on this innovation, in what is essentially a marginal idiom,” he says.
How seriously do the mainstream Irish media take blogging? “I think they’ve been really slow, which is disappointing,” says Sinead Gleeson. “I read an article by Conor Brady on the topic and it was all, ‘These people aren’t journalists’. But I don’t believe that many bloggers do think that they are journalists.” Cian O’Flaherty of Irishelection.com isn’t as critical. “The Irish media generally respond to what its customers want, and the Irish customer generally doesn’t have access to broadband. So you can’t blame them for saying their readers aren’t interested.” Magill columnist and blogger Richard Waghorne thinks that they have it about right. “The quality control isn’t there with blogs. There’s no real disincentive to writing badly or to being unfair. So I don’t think that the papers are wrong in not taking blogs too seriously. Ignoring them would be a mistake, though.”
There are signs the mainstream media are beginning to pay closer attention. The question for much of the mainstream English media, according to Kathryn Corrick, on-line manager with the New Statesman, is not whether to introduce blogs – this has already happened – but the format they should take.
“Things have really speeded up in the last year,” she says. “In the last six months, the Guardian, Telegraph and Times have added new sections to their blogs. Everyone is trying to explore how the medium best fits with the publication.” In February, the Guardian launched “Comment is Free”, in which their journalists, writers, academics, and politicians contribute. “We needed to have more of an on-line presence,” says editor Georgina Henry. “In terms of blogging, we wanted to carve out a space for debate. If we didn’t, it would happen without us.”
Although broadband penetration is an obvious factor inhibiting blogging in Ireland, the greater impact of blogging in the US can also be explained by the wider feeling of dissatisfaction there with mainstream media. There is also the related issue of quality. “A lot of Irish blogs seems to be just top of the head opinion,” says Sarah Carey. “They’re not big on investigative work. A good blogger isn’t someone who simply links to the Irish Times and says, ‘Michael McDowell is such a nasty man’. There has to be more to it than that.”
In the US bloggers have broken some big stories. That hasn’t happened here, although Irish bloggers have certainly been able to cover stories quicker than others – the Dublin riots being an example. Meanwhile, there seems to be only one site that is regarded as an authority – Slugger O’Toole, which deals mainly on the North. Tellingly, O’Toole beat everyone to the story that Colm O’Gorman would be running for office.
Next year’s general election could be the catalyst for a breakthrough for Irish blogging. According to Cian O’Flaherty, no one at irishelections.com is under the illusion that they will have the kind of impact which blogging had in recent US elections – helping, for example, to transform Howard Dean from outsider to frontrunner in the Democrat presidential nomination race, in 2004. But it will be interesting to see if, and how, the general public and politicians engage with the site. So far, O’Flaherty has been encouraged by the response.
Not many bloggers would seriously argue that blogging will take over from mainstream media; rather, the consensus seems to be that blogging will become part of the mainstream. Richard Waghorne put it succinctly: “In time, it will supplement the mainstream media, but it won’t replace it.” The Irish Times, for example, has plans to introduce blogs on is website within the next few months. “We simply can’t afford to ignore them,” says Deirdre Veldon, editor of Ireland.com.
Becky Hogge, managing editor and technology columnist with the excellent website Open Democracy, summarized the UK experience like this: “The mainstream media have dismissed, plagiarised, feared and finally co-opted blogging. They haven’t yet got it right: newspapers are too big to capture the blogging spirit. That doesn’t mean that blogs won’t continue to impact on newspapers. The people I feel the most sorry for are the B-list celebs. How are they expected to get that nice column gig in the back pages, when there are hundreds of thousands of young people getting as much exposure as them simply by signing up to Blogger?” If the UK experience is to be repeated in Ireland, then, perhaps it’s not the mainstream media who need be fearful of blogging: rather Ireland’s tiny pool of “celebrities”, who regularly adorn the pages of VIP and the Sunday Independent’s Life Magazine.