Bloggers: The Mortar Between The Bricks

Image by takomabibelot via Flickr

I think bloggers are the mortar between the bricks, filling in and, in our own way, cementing readers’ relationship(s) to the world. I don’t think, and I expect others to disagree, we are the bricks. Not yet.

By “bricks” I mean the huge, expensive, complicated, lengthy chunks of reporting we all still need to make sense of things. Right now, almost no-one on-line can financially support that, which is frustrating to those of us who’d be happy migrating but still have mortgages and kids and student loans. There’s Pro Publica and a few others, but by the sheer body count of reporters available, they’re still a tiny fraction of newsgatherers.

But the bricks are also conceptual — the dead-trees, old-school way of thinking about, gathering and disseminating news and information. The mortar, every bit as crucial, is us: the personal, lively, immediate, spontaneous details that are so often brutally edited out of most print or  broadcast stories. Color, detail, specificity. A powerful sense of place and time.

A typical American news broadcast barely allocates 30 or 60 or 90 seconds to a story. It’s madness. Stories, all of them, are complex, layered, nuanced. Like many other journalists, I spend many hours every day, like the blind men and the elephant, trying to grasp what any story is really about by consuming a variety of viewpoints, some on-line, some broadcast, some print.

Every journo knows the real story is often what didn’t get out of the notebook, or got cut in the edit suite or laughed off in the daily budget meeting at which the paper’s content is hammered out between up to 20 editors all competing hard for limited space — and which for many major newspapers, remains a room filled with middle-aged white men.

I didn’t believe much in blogging before I arrived here in July and still rarely read many other blogs beyond what I find here. But I feel like I’m slowly starting to discern our role.

Newspapers, dying all around us like bloated dinosaurs sinking into the tar pits, remain too-often tedious. Their story selection is often outdated, their worldview a remnant from the 1950s or 1970s, with “beats” — city hall, courts, cops, education, religion — that still often fail to acknowledge the complexity and multi-disciplinarity of our lives. The rich and fame-seeking are fawned over, the poor  objects of scorn or pity. Their voice and coverage is institutionally determined and institutionally-focused. Their objective, impersonal voice sounds more and more to me these days like a droning noise; I find myself skipping entire chunks of The New York Times, trying to feign interest in one more ivory-tower policy analysis when I crave is authentic, granular, boots-on-the-ground reporting. I want to hear from real people, not just academics and pundits so safely cocooned from that about which they opine.

Magazines are now so tightly edited, tweaked within an inch of their terrified lives to please fleeing or wary advertisers — with Gourmet, BusinessWeek and Metropolitan Home crashing into oblivion within the past month — I can barely stand reading many of them, let alone pitching ideas to them. Editors barely have time to think, let alone spare a few minutes to actually discuss or develop a story idea. I hunger for a well-reported or beautifully-written piece, but find few of them out there now.

Here, I’m consistently finding stories that move, inspire and teach me. That surprises me, only because my expectations of blogging and bloggers were pretty low to start with, maybe something I shouldn’t admit; these days, I just don’t have tons of additional time to focus solely on bloggers’ opinions or insider-y arguments, although I know millions of others clearly appreciate and value them.  When it comes to reading original reporting, sign me up!

The TrueSlant manifesto is knowledge, credibility, authenticity, intimacy and transparency. It’s up to the readers, you, to decide if we’re hitting our marks. But I’m starting to appreciate them more.