Brookings Live Blogging, Impact of the New Media, Part II (11am to noon). (For the first hour's proceedings, see the post below):

Andrew Sullivan: I hired an intern who would run the most critical emails he could find, and I would personally pick an email of the day, which would add some new detail. I was quite impressed with the quality of the writing of the letters I received. But having a comment section could be a mess. That means reading 800 messages a day.

Bloggers are most vicious to each other. There's a whole website devoted to attacking me: Sullywatch. My boyfriend reads it, rather than me.

Audience member question: talk radio, is there a place for the voice of the religious among political moderates...

EJ Dionne: the opinion world in general seems to reward conservatives (?).

Andrew Sullivan: the money thing is a sign of fanatical commitment. But readership continued to rise, even when I annoyed both sides...People went to my site, 'wonder what he's going to make of that.' When you're not as predictable...

I don't think it's depressing. I think there is nothing inherent in the blogosphere that doesn't make for a heterogeneous diverse atmosphere. It's the culture that polarizes, not the blogosphere.

Ellen Ratner: I'm a liberal columnist at Fox and Worldnetdaily, and they treat me very well. No other takers. World Net Daily people are very nice in their daily skills. I don't always find that from some of the people I would have a political affiliation with.

E.J. Dionne: A reader writes in to nominate Ana Marie Cox to replace Richard Leiby as the Reliable Sources columnist at the Washington Post.

Ana Marie Cox: Question about, is blogging journalism?

One of my favorite things about the "Jeff Gannon" case was that Howard Kurtz called Gannon "a blogger." Because he got his facts wrong. Kurtz seemed to think, if a journalist got their facts wrong, they must be a blogger.

E.J. Dionne: This blogging/journalism question is either very important, or it's not....And yet, for those of us who started out in old fashioned journalism, there are standards.

Andrew Sullivan: I think it's not an interesting question. I think people are writing about the world. Journalism is done in England with much less sense of importance than here. Journalists are hacks. All journalists are hacks. Committing journalism is one of the easiest things in the world. There's no elite of journalists, and there should not be schools of journalists. I think the next generation of journalists, are people who are writing their own blogs, 21 year olds who will be noticed by editors of magazines who will notice their distinctive voice.

Andrew Finkel, British journalist based in Istanbul: The US has just reelected a president who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction...
Does the media market reward truth?

Jack Shafer: Michael Massing at NY Review of Books deduced Knight Ridder did the best job on reporting on pre-war WMD Iraq intelligence issue, because perhaps they didn't have the top access.

Jodie Allen: It's cheaper to send someone to sit in the White House to cite anonymous sources than to send someone out to do the reporting.

Andrew Sullivan: One advantage of the blogosphere is it takes advantage of people out there who know stuff. If they trust you, people who know inside stuff will write you....///

Blogosphere gets people to read the actual reporting. The blog, the opinion, attracts the audience, then provides the link to the original reported story, which is then read.

Ana Marie Cox: You can't change what you say because it upsets people.

Andrew Sullivan: I change my mind and consider the blog part of a conversation with my readers. It's not about a monologue. Best blogs interact with people. Creates new literary genre, a way of writing that is neither prose, nor journalism, somewhere between the oped page and talk radio.

Jack Shafer: The first amendment doesn't belong to journalists. It belongs to everyone. I am with Andrew on this: Who is, or who isn't a journalist -- anybody I pull out of this room to write a story for Slate, and their story appears with their byline, voila, they are a journalist. And I think that is how it should be.

I'm with Jodie (Allen): All these media are collapsing into one media. A Newsweek story appears in print, but also appears on the Web. Is CBS strictly a broadcaster, or also a news medium? All these first amendment rights will extend to the blogosphere, I predict.

Jodie Allen: (Who's now at Pew, addressing the recent controversy of a Pew official's videotaped off-the-cuff remarks about liberal foundations funding the campaign finance reform media blitz). Very worrisome that at Pew we are constantly vetting things. It's mostly fear of criticism from conservatives, liberals are not quite so militant...

E.J. Dionne: I am speaking only for myself (I'm affiliated with Pew only for my religion project.) I think there is an excessive defensiveness for people who may find themselves on the liberal side. My conservative friends fund some interesting projects. I think funding the campaign finance issue is a perfectly respectable thing to do...(the above paraphrased).

Jack Shafer: As I remember from the NY Post story, this Pew official was bragging on the video about having created the illusion of grass roots demand for campaign finance regulation -- sort of gloating over the fact that they had created this Potemkin village and made it look like it was rising from the earth. There's a term for that, astroturf.

*Andrew Sullivan: The end of privacy is happening independently of blogging.

Question from audience member: Two questions. Does the blogosphere do a particularly good job of covering the Terri Schiavo case? And there's been this discussion between Michael Kinsley and Susan Estrich: why are there so very few women bloggers....

*Sullivan: Newspapers are great for the facts of the case, blogs are good for reading the temperature of the right on the Schiavo case. Reading the zealot blogs on the right gives me a much better understanding of what is motivating the religious right. I understand the religious right much better by reading the blogs than from the mainstream media, partly because they never cover them. The blogging there can really help you understand what is happening inside a movement. What makes them excited, which tells you a lot about where American politics is going. It's like going into a thousand town hall meetings, the emotional quality. Blogs are very emotional. Mainstream media is designed to be very cool.

Ana Marie Cox: Blogs are really good because blogging is so personal, you get a lot of personal history, that is part of the story. That is what blogs also are good for.

As for women in blogging, I've been involved in three areas in my career: technology, journalism and blogging. Women are not well represented in any of those spheres. Don't think solution is just to call for more women. There has to be some kind of organic solution.

Blogging - more conversational - happen to be things women are known to be comfortable with perhaps - way into other areas.

Question from audience member Chris Conroy: blogs are more active, and interactive, you link to the original source, and people go read that. My friend Nick and I have a small blog, Renaissance Man. We get read by people all over the country, and have been linked to by Sullivan. It seems blogging creates a more informed electorate. Can blogs educate people?

Ruy Teixeira: Think it's interesting we're having this very civilized Brookings event on blogging. A few years ago no one took blogging very seriously. Talking about this new media universe that's evolved, the blogs have a place in it...

But it seems to me most people say blogs do have a role to play, part of uber media that is evolving, here to stay, and that's a good thing. That's what I heard.

Final comments:

Andrew Sullivan: Absolutely agree with Chris that the blogs are an educational tool. Actively seeking out information on the blogs you learn more. What blogging is doing in places like Iran and Iraq in terms of getting rid of the fear, are actually beginning to build an underground political movement for change through blogging. The Iranian government has jailed and tortured bloggers. Far from being weird, it's going to be a huge tool for political change in the world.

I do think blogging will remain predominantly male. I think the atmosphere of charged political debate will attact more men then women. No one is not hiring women bloggers. It is entirely a function of who wants to read them and who wants to write them. And for some reason, this tends to be male.

Jodie Allen: Blogging will be a tool for political change. But I do think we need to worry about the state of American journalism and how it's going to be paid for. This is not the blogs' fault. But we as a society have to recognize that it's costly to gather news and it's a very very valuable commodity.

Why are women less represented? Political journalism is basically thumb sucking. And women are less likely to think their thumbs are tasty than men are.

Maureen Dowd's columns the last two Sundays address the gender issue...(The late) Meg Greenfield, one of the most opinionated journalists in the world, when she went to write, always wrapped her acerbic observations around a joke. (softened them in print).

Jack Shafer: Whenever there's new media, there's always this concern about 'the barbarians at the gates.' In the end, the media will totally coopt the new media...

Posted by Laura at March 22, 2005 10:59 AM