Blogs Mix Up the Media

▪ 2003

       Web logs were not new, but as a forum for personal expression they sprouted prodigiously on the Internet, captured new audiences, and drew intensified attention in the media in 2002. Web logs (usually abbreviated to “blogs”) originated in the U.S. in 1997 as a few on-line journals, often with links to news items on the World Wide Web plus brief, personal comments on those items by the originators-editors (“bloggers”), as well as responses from readers. By mid-2002 the number of blogs had grown from only 23 (by one count) at the start of 1999 to as many as 500,000 globally. This growth was fueled by the spread of free blog-creation software (such as Blogger, Pitas, Movable Type, and Radio UserLand), which removed the need for the blogger to be skilled in computer programming.

      In the wake of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, a new type of Web log was born: the “war blog.” The generally better quality of writing and the political stance of the blogger (often right-wing) distinguished the war blogs from the on-line diaries. War bloggers included Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, whose blog reportedly received more than 800,000 visits in one month from more than 200,000 individual readers. Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, drew around 43,000 visits in a single day to his InstaPundit site. The Jerusalem Post also reported in 2002 that Israeli and Palestinian bloggers were writing Web logs as a way to let the outside world see their respective sides of the ongoing Middle East conflict.

      Alex Beam, a columnist at the Boston Globe, scathingly referred to blogs as an “infinite echo chamber of self-regard.” Web logs' high site-visit figures made the mainstream media jumpy, however, especially as some of the new bloggers carried on their sites detailed criticism of stories in newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. A number of mainstream media outlets even added blogs to their Web sites, notably the British daily The Guardian, which ran a competition for the U.K.'s best blog. The on-line magazine Slate embraced a preexisting blog by Mickey Kaus, a former Newsweek magazine reporter.

      In 2001 John Robb, president and chief operating officer of blogging software developer UserLand, put forward a business use for Web logs, in which workers would use blogs as a collaborative medium to record and disseminate their thoughts. In 2002, however, the Web log came of age; the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism began offering a class in blogging, in which students created a blog on copyright issues. The course tutors were John Battelle, a cofounder of Wired magazine, and Paul Grabowicz, media program director at the school.

      While veteran bloggers might object to the new, more politicized Web logs, blogging as an expanding form of on-line communication seemed to be here to stay.

Alan Stewart

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