On Talking Shite

We've had a huge response to this essay by Max McGuinness, published in the February issue of the magazine. Is it the first comprehensive exposé of quite how lazy and inept the Irish media really is when it comes to the interweb? We think so.

It has been said that everyone in Ireland has a book in them... and that’s where it should stay. In the past, our capacity for mass-distributed blarney was held in check by the prohibitive cost of publishing. But all barriers to telling the entire world precisely how one feels about the price of milk, the Iraq War, or the fact that dogs owned by fat people are invariably fat themselves, have fallen thanks to the invention of the blog.

For the price of an annual subscription to this magazine, anyone can post their most intimate, anodyne or incoherent thoughts online (and hover over their email inbox in anticipation of a flood of congratulatory comments from grateful readers). Terrified by the realisation that millions are prepared to patter away at their keyboards without expense accounts, libel-savvy or “well placed sources,” what the blogosphere universally derides as the “mainstream media” – MSM – has been desperately trying to catch up. Hence normally reluctant staff are now being ordered to churn out even more copy lest their sites end up being, like, so Web 1.0.

Despite our endlessly trumpeted hi-tech credentials, the Irish are slow to embrace this electronic zeitgeist. Though there are probably thousands of Irish blogs, only a handful manage to attract more than a few hundred readers a day and none manage to make any money out of it. The entire Irish MSM is responsible for a grand total of five blogs. Three of these are produced by the Irish Times. Notwithstanding the fact that its soaring costs contributed to the paper’s near financial meltdown, the paper of record has a decidedly dreary website that requires readers to pay €79 a year for the privilege of trawling through cutting-edge coverage of the opening of the slurry season.

The paper’s online duty editor, Deirdre Veldon, says the company is at a “sensitive” point in a preliminary consultative process assessing whether to integrate the newspaper with ireland.com, which, amazingly, continues to exist in an entirely separate building. The newspaper, she says, will remain “the core of what we do” and she is unwilling to elaborate on the proposed extent of integration, which on British newspapers like the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times has been advanced to the point where reporters have to update stories throughout the day on the web. These publications have grasped the point that having a separate web identity dilutes their brand unnecessarily.

Independent News & Media makes the Irish Times look like Steve Jobs.

Aside from a rudimentary breaking-news service and two uninspiring blogs – one about rugby, the other about wine, both almost impossible to locate on the site – the Independent group’s barely functioning websites in both Britain and Ireland offer no regular online-only content. Apparent hostility to the internet is ingrained at both management and editorial level.

Last November IN&M’s Chief Operating Officer Gavin O’Reilly delivered a speech, ‘The Enduring Power of Print’, to the Society of Editors in Manchester. In that speech O’Reilly decried the “wilful self-mutilation” of an industry seemingly bent on destroying its main product: the newspaper. He stresses that publishers “need to embrace online as an addition to – not replacement of – print.” But there is little sign of this happening in his own company. And when he waxes lyrical about delivering “the serendipity of life to you in a concise, colourful, and portable way, and all for half the price of a cup of coffee,” it’s clear that this is what he thinks journalism is really about.

The Sunday Independent is fond of running stories about the dangers of the internet, where employers are reading your Bebo profiles and paedophiles can easily infiltrate social networking sites supposedly reserved for kids. As the regrettably defunct Blogorrah pointed out last year, the coverage boiled down to asserting: “Internet = BAD; Printed newspapers = GOOD.” The Irish Independent published a sniffy review of blogger Sarah Carey’s appearance on the Tubridy Show last year, remarking that the host “circled and circled before finally uttering the words that had been hanging around like a stubborn stain: ‘vanity project’.” The London Independent made a brief excursion into blogging in 2006, failed to update any of its blogs for weeks, and now appears to have scrapped the experiment entirely. In an interview with the Guardian last year, editor Simon Kelner defended his indifference to the web: “We’re happy not being pioneers, because it means we won’t get shot in the back.”

Since Independent News & Media operates as a near monopoly in this country, controlling nearly 70 per cent of the country’s daily newspapers, O’Reilly can afford to do more or less whatever he likes. On account of the Eircom débâcle (which may have had something to with a certain AJF O’Reilly) we have some of the worst broadband infrastructure in the developed world – severely limiting the potential penetration of online media for the time being. And in the Irish Times, they can count on a traditionally complacent and conservative rival, while the Mail does not even bother putting its Irish edition online. From a commercial perspective, techno-evangelism does not seem too pressing, given that the group continues to post record revenues and profits (though a falling share price suggests there may be trouble to come).

The relationship between prominent bloggers and the MSM is more complicit, less antagonistic, than a superficial reading suggests. Look, for instance, at Twenty Major, a vulgar version of Myles na gCopaleen. (Ireland’s most fêted blogger refuses to reveal his true identity; he is, he insists, a shepherd, who puffs away unmolested in Ron’s, the fictional bar where much of the action of the blog takes place.) Like other champions of the Irish blogosphere, such as Sarah Carey (photo: Paddy Benson) who obtained a column in the Sunday Times on the strength of her blog, Twenty Major’s ultimate validation, and only prospect of gainful literary employ, has arrived courtesy of Old Media – a book deal with Hodder & Staughton. The Order of the Phoenix Park is due to be published this month. Twenty explains that all he ever wanted to do was write in his own twisted way; faced with a choice between the publisher’s slush pile and the instant gratification of a blog, there was little contest.

Those who can, do; those who can’t, blog – can’t make any money out of writing or publishing, that is. Bloggers who want to exchange their bad-tempered pyjamas for the crumpled beige travel suit of the real hack must await the salvatory phone call of the MSM.

Ireland’s only serious political blogger, Slugger O’Toole, has thus been snapped up by the Daily Telegraph after several years of being one step ahead of the Ulster pack. Started by Northern Irish political researcher Mick Fealty in 2002, the website has become essential reading for Belfast political hacks. For while the posts consist largely of analysis written by Fealty, the comments section has, he says, been colonised by political insiders who can debate issues more candidly under the cover of anonymity. The blog has also broken some genuine news stories, including the closure of the republican newspaper Daily Ireland and a racist campaign by loyalist paramilitaries to force Belfast estate agents to stop renting properties to Blacks and Asians. The latter story made it to the Guardian front page having been initiated by an anonymous comment on the website. Fealty also believes that Slugger O’Toole’s extensive coverage of the Robert McCartney murder helped to bring the case back onto the agenda when most mainstream journalists had stopped writing about it.

Since bloggers possess unlimited column inches and face no deadlines, except of course the prerogative to write obsessively and more or less continuously, it is arguable that there is a certain kind of analytical journalism, concerned more with poring over the details of a story in search of what Fealty calls “hidden contexts,” which is only truly possible online.

During the 2004 US presidential election, CBS News claimed to have found memoes containing criticism of George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard by his superior officers. This sparked uproar in the conservative blogosphere, where dozens of writers quickly pointed out historical inconsistencies in the documents, which suggested they were forgeries. The channel retracted the story after two weeks, admitting that it could not fully authenticate the documents, and the episode is credited with hastening the departure of veteran anchor Dan Rather. Would Charlie Haughey have got away with living out of his rich pals’ pockets for so long if blogging had existed? If the handful of journalists who attempted to investigate the subject had been able to hammer away at the subject online on an hourly basis, joined by a mass of libel-happy amateur bloggers, then perhaps “The Boss’s” mendacious facade would have crumbled a lot earlier.

Fealty, however, is unimpressed by the view of some of his fellow bloggers that “puncturing the reputation of mainstream politicians is the mark of success.” The format appeals to him more as a vehicle for debate and exchange; he compares the blogosphere to the coffeehouses of the 18th Century – a place where ideas and news stories can be discussed in a neutral setting. (I would prefer the company of Diderot and Voltaire in the heyday of Le Procope over the virtual avatars of irate DUP councillors, but one sees his point.)

The detached style of Slugger O’Toole is markedly different from most political blogs, which often read like a man shouting at the television. In America, sites like Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and the Huffington Post have considerable, though sometimes exaggerated, influence on the politics of the Democratic Party. At the very least they pushed party leaders into more assertive opposition to George W. Bush and helped to propel Howard Dean to the front of the Democratic field in 2004. He may have failed to win the nomination but bloggers were again instrumental in supporting his successful candidacy for the Chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee in 2005. No comparable culture of “netroots” political activism has developed in this country, and the consensus among all the bloggers and journalists interviewed for this article was that this is unlikely to change, though they were at a loss to explain exactly why.

In Ireland, we are much closer to our politicians; there is no sense that they are cut off in what Americans call the “Beltway” – a reference to Washington DC’s ring road. Thanks to the chronic over-representation of the Dáil, meeting a local TD is very easily done and most deputies are obsessed with tending to the parish pump. When constituents have a grievance they can address it to their TD in person at his or her weekly surgery. Why then, bother writing a blog when you can shove your finger at Bertie’s nose? By contrast, the rise of the political blogosphere in the USA coincided with the Iraq War when liberal activists felt betrayed by the supine quiescence of Democratic national leaders and their failure to represent the anti-war views of their base.

Readers of Irish blogs also seem to have more interest in the personal rather than the political – be it Twenty Major’s anarchic anecdotes or the domestic tales of Sarah Carey, who says that her readership only really picked up once she switched from Bush-bashing to writing about her babies.

DIT media lecturer Harry Browne argues that political blogging is a distraction from the real business of marching in the streets and going to branch meetings. According to Browne, if the people are pouring their energies into reading and spreading information while sitting at home, those in power can rest easy. Traditional collective action is more effective, says Browne, at bringing about political change. Blogging promotes what he calls “a narcissistic illusion of presence” because for a blogger who gets a few comments from readers about a post, this may be “more reaction than they get in the real world.” However, he does credit blogging with demystifying journalism and showing that anyone can do it really.

While many print journalists are despondent about the effects of the internet and the future of the industry (one recently described the gloomy atmosphere at a colloquium of his peers as being like “a conference of textile manufacturers or ship builders in the late-1970s”), Browne is comparatively sanguine. He predicts a big decline in the number of professional journalists, but this will be no great loss because “the record shows we’re shit shovellers... We process pseudo-events and dish them out to the public to suit the interests of power brokers and PR companies.”

Watergate created an aura of competence and courage around journalists. Bob Woodward’s subsequent decision to take up permanent residence inside the posterior of the White House (though 2006’s State of Denial, his devastating insider account of the Bush presidency, slightly redeems him) ought to temper the legend of fearless muckraking enshrined in All The President’s Men. But if we dispel journalistic myths entirely, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwather – losing the one source, however flawed, capable of providing dependable public oversight.

Time’s highly successful blogger Andrew Sullivan has argued, like Browne, that “the blogosphere is threatening to some professional journalists because it demystifies the craft. It makes it seem easy because, in essence, it often is.” Responding in the Financial Times, Ian Buruma writes:

“There is something to this, but demystification comes with a price. Every institution relies on some mystique. It is good to be sceptical, but if conventional journalism, with all the checks and resources that traditional institutions have at their disposal, entirely loses the public’s trust, there is nothing really to take its place; certainly not the millions of voices echoing through cyberspace.”

While amateur bloggers might be able to point out the inconsistencies in the Bush memoes broadcast by CBS and give a fading story continued online momentum, could they ever have pulled off Watergate? Woodward and Bernstein’s scoop relied on a combination of tip-offs and relentless tedious legwork. An unpaid, self-publishing blogger is unlikely to have the same access, resources, or determination.

By sapping public confidence in professional journalism, bloggers who rage against the MSM may thus be undermining the very culture of confrontational journalism which they claim to represent. But a much bigger problem is that no matter how much publishers and editors prattle on about seizing the opportunity of the internet, the fact is that the web looks set to destroy the traditional business model of publishing and there is no obvious replacement. The problem is worse for the music industry, which now finds it impossible to protect their copyright from illegal downloading. In both instances, the case is growing for broadband suppliers to give a cut of their revenues to record companies and online media. After all, the internet is not free; we just pay the people who allow us to access articles and songs rather than those who actually create them. But the principle of profit-sharing is only just seeping onto the legislative agenda and, given the fight which will be put up by telecom companies, an ultimate settlement along these lines is probably many years off.

Publishers can at least attach advertising to their product. But online journalism is currently parasitic on revenues from print sales, which are declining irreversibly. Online ad sales at US papers rose by over 20 per cent last year, down from a 33 per cent in 2006, but sales of print advertising fell by over 8 per cent. The overall drop in ad sales was thus over 7 per cent since online advertising accounts for only 7 per cent of total ad sales; this share will increase but it is hard to see how it will ever make up for the shortfall in print ad sales for decades to come.

In this country, the limited size of the market makes the prospect of profitable online journalism even more remote. Constantin Gurdgiev, economist and editor of Business & Finance, notes that “the profitable opportunities relating to web-delivered journalism aimed exclusively at Irish audiences are most likely small, implying that any serious journalist, earning in excess of €55,000 annually, simply will not see a return on their investment from web-based journalism.” To be commercially viable, says Gurdgiev, Irish online journalism would have to find an international audience – unlikely, in his view, because of the provincialism of most Irish hacks.

In Britain, all the quality dailies except the Daily Telegraph are losing tens of millions every year. Plummeting circulation suggests it will be impossible for them to break even without heavy cost-cutting. That means fewer, more badly-paid journalists producing an inferior product which is likely to lose even more readers in a seemingly unbreakable vicious circle. The closure of some titles will only halt the slide temporarily as any boost in readership for the remaining titles will eventually start to fall again. Investors are only interested in markets which are set to grow and newspapers seem doomed to permanent contraction. Weeklies and monthlies, particularly the Economist, have managed to buck the trend somewhat, but they too will find it hard to escape from the demographic disaster of young people’s indifference to print media. According to a National Readership Survey published in December, the number of readers in the UK aged 15-24 has dropped 37 per cent since 1992, while there has been an even steeper fall of 40 per cent among those aged 25-34.

The idea that this generation will wake up to the charm of newspapers in middle age is fanciful.

There have been calls in the US for the government to start subsidising broadsheets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, which, it is argued, provide a valuable public service now under threat. But for journalism to be in hock to the very institution it is supposed to be monitoring is hardly an ideal state of affairs. Subsidies for newspapers in France have created a culture of subtle political interference and have not even saved the French press from a generalised financial crisis which is even worse than in Britain and the USA.

The paradox facing the industry is that it has to rely on old media to fund new media, which then cannibalises the consumers of old media in a vicious circle.

Gavin O’Reilly asks, “Why must it always be a case of either or? Is it just possible that the consumer is capable of multi-tasking; is capable of consuming a multitude of media and that it need necessarily not be just online?” Clearly many people do read the same newspaper in hard copy and online, as new material is added to the site throughout the day. But the same neo-classical economists whose support for low taxes is popularised in the pages of the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent are also rather strident about the rational self-interest of consumers. People do not tend to pay for something which they can get for free.  Consequently, the more people log on to a newspaper’s free website, the less they go out to buy the paper. If this is false, then collapsing circulation suggests people are turning away from news altogether – hardly a better outcome for publishers, and unlikely to be the case since combined online and print readership in fact appears to be at an all-time high in the USA at least (according to the Center for Excellence in Journalism’s 2006 ‘The State of the News Media’ report). Any given online reader produces a small fraction of the revenue produced by a reader of the print edition – 20-30 per cent in the US market, according to the same report – so a successful website may perversely hit overall revenues as print readers shift online.

Charging for content online is now generally recognised to be a stupid move, because it alienates advertisers and irritates both readers and writers. The New York Times recently decided to abandon its online subscription service and provide all content for free and the Financial Times has partly removed restrictions on access to its website. The Irish Times is, according to Deirdre Veldon, currently re-assessing its subscription model, though she hastens to add that it is “fairly exceptional that we are near the top of the Irish media market” in terms of readers despite charging for content. Top they may be; but ireland.com continues to lose money well over a decade after its launch.

The quality of journalism itself may also be suffering from the creation of “integrated newsrooms” where reporters who previously only had to worry about meeting their evening deadlines now have to update stories throughout the day as well as writing blogs and producing podcasts, video and other newfangled techie things of dubious value. According to 2007’s ‘The State of the News Media,’ news “sites have done more ... to exploit immediacy, but they have done less to exploit the potential for depth.” A section editor on a British quality daily complained to me recently that his reporters were so busy podcasting that they did not have any time left for actually finding out the news.

The success of Gawker Media in New York provides little encouragement for those striving to transfer quality journalism to the web. Created by Fleet Street exile Nick Denton in 2002, Gawker is a series of blogs dedicated to disseminating chippy poison throughout cyberspace. The target is anyone who has the misfortune to appear more successful than the site’s pathologically bitter young writers. A typical day’s output includes one blogger expressing his wish to see Katie Holmes break her leg, another saying of a rival journalist “no one likes her,” and a third describing Rosie O’Donnell as “a big fat loudmouth.” Many of Gawker’s targets have it coming, but it is disturbing that the site’s reason for existence is to be as nasty as possible about everyone and everything.

In Old Media, satire is typically paired with a public-spirited muck-raking instinct and eagerness to expose corruption, as is the case with Private Eye or France’s Le Canard Enchaîné. Gawker, on the other hand, snipes without snooping. It is symptomatic of an industry which has become ever nastier and yet lost its teeth. When journalists spend their days concocting new insults to fling at the rich and powerful, the rich and powerful can relax in the knowledge that their position is secure.

While the Huffington Post gives little indication of turning a profit despite its millions of readers (and this bastion of Hollywood Leftism’s refusal to pay any of its bloggers), Denton is estimated to be making at least $10 million a year out of his vitriol machine. If the only way to make real money out of Web 2.0 is to call celebrities “douchebags,” there cannot be much hope for the survival of serious journalism this century.

According to New York magazine, Gawker has also pioneered a potentially revolutionary pay-for-performance system which should send most hacks scurrying into the recruitment department of the nearest PR company. Gawker’s writers are paid according to the number of page views each of their posts receives. If it is now possible to gauge a particular journalist’s raw popularity precisely, this information can then be used to sell advertising alongside his or her writing at adjustable rates.

The media is run by capitalists eager (and, in the case of PLCs, legally obliged) to maximise profits. So how long can it be before the bigger fish of online media implement a system similar to Gawker’s? The Guardian would naturally be filled with editorials moaning about “the race to the bottom.” But hang on. Profitability already trumps quality at Britain’s most right-on newspaper when it comes to figuring out rates. While you might get up to £300 for an op-ed published in the paper itself, if the same article were only published online on their Comment Is Free blog, you would receive a mere £75. This clear breach of NUJ guidelines is entirely explained by the fact that content in the print edition generates more revenue than online content. Indeed, the undercutting practised by Comment Is Free uncannily mirrors the actual difference between the revenue earned from the average print reader as opposed to an online reader – the latter generates about 25 per cent as much as the former; Comment Is Free, based on these figures, pays exactly 25 per cent of what the print edition does. Of course, it’s always been a Fleet Street adage that you should never work for a left-wing paper because they’ll sack you on Christmas Eve. Still, if the Guardian is prepared to adopt such barefaced exploitation in the age of the internet, we journoes are all doomed.

The greater financial value of printed copy is in fact paralleled by the instinctively greater journalistic value we may be inclined to place on it. When I asked the Irish Times’ features editor Hugh Linehan what the difference is between the content of a blog and an article published in hard copy, he admitted there was one without being able to specify its precise nature. There is, he said, “less gravitas attached to material appearing on a blog.” In principle, this should not be the case. Blogs just consist of writing, as do printed articles. The only actual difference between the two forms is that you can insert links to other articles on the blog – a curious case of a writer actually inviting the reader to stop reading his or her piece.

The folksy American broadcaster Garrison Keillor wrote a column last year in which he asked: “A man at a laptop is a man at a desk, a still, a drone. Where is the nobility here?” He continued: “A newspaper reader, by comparison, is a swordsman, a wrangler, a private eye. Holding a newspaper frees you to express yourself, sort of like holding a sax did for Coltrane.” Keillor is right that reading news online is a poor aesthetic substitute for the sensuous experience of folding your way through a crackling broadsheet in a comfortable chair. A newspaper can be read standing up on a train, lying down on the grass, sitting on the jacks, or even walking down the street – none of which is really feasible when using a computer.

The abandonment of the newspaper thus amounts to replacing one kind of convenience with another. We sacrifice the portable aesthetic pleasure associated with the newspaper in favour of the free and up-to-the-minute coverage provided by the internet. It is a curious case of a reversal of the process of “reification” described by Theodor Adorno whereby we constantly strive to make the intangible tangible. For example, when a journalist calls someone for an interview and is told by the person at the other end of the line that “I’ll give you ten minutes,” she is subliminally asserting that time is something concrete and tradable – in a word, a commodity. What we are seeing with the rise of online journalism is the de-commodification of writing; something which used to be given a fixed, physical, tradable form has become ephemeral and generally more expensive to produce than it can be sold for. Online journalism’s lack of physical form explains why we value it less and are unprepared to pay for it; our impulse is to fetishise objects and denigrate things which resist permanent objective form – such as a repeatedly updated online news story or blog.

Aside from the seemingly insurmountable financial problems associated with the internet, if quality journalism is to survive into the future, writers’ attitudes towards material online will have to change. Instead of thinking of blogging and the internet as media inherently primed for frivolity and instant gratification à la Gawker, we must revert to thinking of the internet as a publishing device which is just quicker and more widely distributable than print. The online magazine Slate has already embraced this principle. Possessing a team of talented writers such as Christopher Hitchens, Slate specialises in informed commentary which is not obviously different in style or content for being online. Reactive blogging is a relatively insignificant part of the operation. The site remains relatively stable in form throughout the day whereas the likes of The Huffington Post, Guardian Unlimited and Gawker change with, for this writer, irritating frequency.

In France, Rue89.com, founded in May by journalists made redundant by the left-wing daily Libération, has become the first genuinely successful online-only newspaper in Europe. What sets Rue89 apart is the fact that its staff continue to write and research stories in the same way they did for their old newspapers without having to meet the prohibitive start-up cost of a print publication. The onus is on original exclusives, not having to rewrite the story every five minutes. Consequently, they have published some real scoops, notably revealing a case of journalistic fraud in the USA and the fact that Cécilia Sarkozy had not bothered to vote for her now ex-husband in the second round of last year’s presidential election. Entirely financed by advertising, and owned by its staff, the site receives almost 100,000 unique visitors a day and is being courted by potential investors.

The ultimate advantage of the web over print was demonstrated after last month’s New Hampshire primary. Faced with an inconvenient time difference, British journalists filed copy irresponsibly calling the election, and in some cases, the nomination and presidency, for Obama. The print editions were thus shown up by the their own websites, which had already posted the story of Hillary’s victory by the time most people were picking up their morning paper.

The success of Rue89 and Slate shows that good journalism, produced by a small but high-quality team of writers and underpinned by old-fashioned journalistic and literary standards, is possible – and, eventually, maybe even profitable – on the web, though there will be less of it than currently available. No matter how much we enjoy the smell and feel of a freshly-printed broadsheet, there is no going back; the internet genie cannot be put back in its bottle. The web has demystified journalism while mystifying editors and publishers, whose panicked response is to spout shallow technophilia and replace experienced hacks with semi-literate bloggers. It is time for the industry to stand up to the internet’s most degrading tendencies and reassert that it’s writing, not typing, which sells newspapers – erm, I mean flashing banner ads and video streams from BMW.

John Waters: in too deep?

The Sage of Tara Street on the interweb

There are few bloggers who can match the analytical and literary brilliance of the Irish Times’ John Waters, whose deft denunciation of blogging on Newstalk last month showed exactly why some people’s opinions are just more valuable than others.

“I say to people ‘Do you blog? And if you do, then please leave my presence immediately,’” announced the Virgilian pundit.

“Not all blogs are stupid,” pleaded the host.

“They are stupid, Claire – you know, come on. They’re all stupid, every single one of them. Have you ever looked up a blog on the internet and find (sic) [mimics stupid blogger] ‘Oh I think this. No I think that’? It’s appalling. It’s appalling stuff. The way I put it to people: 60 per cent of the content of the internet is pornography. Now how seriously would we take a newspaper of which that was true?”

Take note, bloggers: “60 per cent of the content of the internet is pornography.” That’s called “research”; that’s what real journalists do. It’s normal practice for a responsible journalist like Mr. Waters to find at least two sources for a fact like this. “Now how seriously would we take a newspaper of which that was true?” That’s called a “rhetorical question” – one of the litany of stylistic devices which Mr. Waters can call upon after his years of experience as a salaried man of letters. “Oh I think this. No I think that.” Mr. Waters is perceptively pointing out that blogs typically consist of mere opinion, unsupported by any original reporting, whereas what Mr. Waters writes for the Irish Times is not bitter, incoherent, uninformed waffle; it is indeed The Truth. Be in no doubt Mr. Waters, we take you and your newspaper just as seriously as you do.

I would not have encountered this illuminating exchange were it not for the blog of Twenty Major, winner of Best Overall Blog in the 2007 Irish Blog Awards, who duly confirmed Mr. Waters’s doubts by describing him as a “fucking fanny.” Just as well that Twenty admitted in an interview that he was “not a journalist and not restricted in the same way others are.” The blogger followed up his disgraceful treatment of one national treasure by performing a cruel impersonation of another, the esteemed broadcaster “George Cook,” and fabricated an exchange between the two men in the course of which Mr. Waters’s words were re-used out of context and made to express the opposite of what the man had intended. (Listen here.) The slippery perils of new media indeed! “George Cook” risibly concludes that “essentially, a newspaper column is simply a blog in print, isn’t it? It would be a very foolish man who tried to dismiss one over the other.”

Come on, George, why would we pay to read a newspaper column when we can read stuff that’s just as good online for free? Duh!

Comments

[Eoin Purcell]

Max,

This may be both the best and worst exposition on Irish online media I have read thus far.

Best because it is at once thoughtful and considered and worst because it is also unfocused and inconclusive.

Thoughtfully you have successfully moved beyond the simple its MSN v bloggers (something too few bloggers or journalists can do), your point that the platform offers opportunity to old school reporters such as those of the Slate and rue89.com is well made and the way you delve into the economics of it goes well beyond what many in the msn have done in recent times.

On the other hand you still fall for the fallacy that "blogging" as such can be described in broad brush strokes, you seem intent on offering no way forward for smart journalists and seem oppossed to the idea that even as raw, unedited and amateur as it is blogging might produce decent writers and journalists (other than it seems 20 major).

One of the issues you have failed to consider though is that in all likelihood most Irish readers would never buy The Dubliner but they might just trip across your blog sometime online and give it a read!

Still a great piece well worth reading!
Eoin

[elly parker]

Quote 1: Though there are probably thousands of Irish blogs, only a handful manage to attract more than a few hundred readers a day and none manage to make any money out of it.

Quote 2: That’s called “research”; that’s what real journalists do. It’s normal practice for a responsible journalist like Mr. Waters to find at least two sources for a fact like this.

Do you actually read what you write? Or believe in any of it? If you had bothered to do any research, you would have discovered that many Irish blogs have large regular global readerships. The 'main man' of Irish blogging and organiser of the Irish Blog Awards, Damien Mulley has had over 700,000 visits since June 2005.

Again, many Irish people are making money out of blogging - while for some this might be a small supplemental income, there are several bloggers who are paying their mortgages from blogging, through a combination of adverts and affiliate programs on their blogs.

"Talking Shite" really was a good choice of title for this article!

[Deborah]

The thing that comes up again and again in this and many MSM vs. Blogging debates is the perception that blogs are out to replace print media. This is just simply not the case. You seem to have some sort of belief that people start blogs in the hopes that one day they will reach the heights of being published. That's very far from the truth. Personally I started my food blog as means to write down recipes. I was always making original meals and then not remembering what I did, so to have a medium to write them down was a blessing. I never expected to get such a fan base and to have people actually read, try and offer suggestions on my recipes. I am not trying to compete with or replace Food and Wine - I'm just doing my thing.

I honestly believe if you polled bloggers, very very few would say they started their blog in the hopes they'd be published or "discovered!" I also doubt that any of them would feel they were out to replace traditional journalists. Blogging is simply a social media. It's the same as going down to the pub and having a few drinks and discussing Bertie's latest shenanigans with friends, only cheaper!

[Ger]

Just four points from a professional "MSM" journalist:

1. Like most bloggers, you need an editor. Your rant is way too long, repetitive and tedious at times. But it is many times better than some of the articles published in print-media.

2. I agree with most of it. I have on many occasions refused to rewrite PR rubbish, quote press releases without checking them or accept statements from people who do not make themselves available for a chat. I now freelance from home and choose only to work with editors I respect.

3. I believe the reason lots of people are switching to the web for their news has a lot to do with the way it allows them to choose what they want to read.

Mainstream papers fall between too many stools. Lots of people would rather skip the sports pages, the women's section (which I find is often full of boring PR puffs, slimming / beauty advice and, paradoxically, attacks on slim / pretty celebs) and the news pages which tend to be aimed at men who would otherwise read top-shelf mags.

4. Mainstream journalism could reclaim its readers if it published newspapers full of good, hard news - all well-researched. The hacks who waste days rewriting agency and PR copy could be better employed actually going out and getting stories.

Meanwhile, for those who like reading about sport, celebs (real or "reality"), etc, there should be separate publications.

Good luck with your blog.

Ger

[Ronan]

How long is this piece? I mean, I think it is the longest article I have ever seen in my entire life.

Plus when you quote people, why are they not actually quoted?

I read the whole thing but the article is far too long to engage with fully, too many conflicting points.

However one area in which I think you missed the point is this suggestion that some bloggers are "successful" and others aren't.

Practically the greatest strength of blogging is that it exists independent of commercial pressures and so it can serve people with minority interests.

The net gathers similar people together at these nodal websites and suddenly you have a place where 300 people from all over the world who like whatever less popular thing are meeting daily and discussing stuff.

It's sad and stupid to look at the blogosphere and criticise it because not every blog is going to have mass popularity, this is the entire point, it facilitates discussion about subjects that aren't discussed.

Also the amount of lazy assumptions in the piece are absurd.

Plus how do you know people haven't made money from their blogs? What about people being given professional work from new media as a result of their blogs? Tons of bloggers have made money like this and I bet you haven't read half of their sites.

For anyone who wants a decent article about the relationship between mainstream media and blogs, I recommend this http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/01/21/berk_essy.html

It's from January 2005. If it proves anything it's that yes, Ireland is behind the US as regards blogging, but mostly when it comes to people sketching BLOGGING VS JOURNALISM in the same tired old binary over and over.

[Ronan]

"Is it the first comprehensive exposé of quite how lazy and inept the Irish media really is when it comes to the interweb? We think so. "

the ironing is delicious

[Dan Sullivan]

A couple of points

John Waters when challenged later on Newstalk for even one source for the figure of 60% of the internet consisting of pornography couldn't come up with even one simply saying it was common knowledge. That is a sign of someone doing no basic research at all.

I think the more interesting contrast as gone into here is the individual blogger compared to the individual journalist. Looking at the whole of the blogosphere versus the MSM (actually it is DTP Dead Tree Press when it is being derided) is a comparison that too many commentators seek to make. If a person was to gather every publication (and I do mean every fanzine, local newsrag) in print in the English language into a room and then browse through them, they might very quickly give up on the medium completely.

Fact is the IT which I still buy, has a considerable amount of syndicated material from the AP, Reuters and the Guardian. In fact the majority of the "News" is often from outside the IT house.

Elly - I would note that Max covers himself quite competently by saying only a few bloggers have more than a few hundred readers per day so Mulley can have as you say 700,000 visits since June 2005 (which is well over 700 day ago) and that would be still be somewhat less than 1,000 per day. I would actually reckon his traffic might be higher than that but still the point Max makes is correct. Interestingly rehasing my point above about syndication a significant portion (perhaps half) of Mulley's content merely links to other content. So it is more Mulley as aggregator or newsagent that draws much of his traffic and not original material.

[Jay Lyden]

Maybe I was reading a different article but I never thought Max was reducing the debate to MSN vs Blogs. In fact he is a committed (!) blogger, i think he's really only bemoaning the lack of real quality in the irish blogging community on a serious news level and maybe pointing out the potential blogging has as a journalistic platform that our local MSM (and bloggers) haven't grasped yet. Which is fair enough. As for it being the longest article ever, maybe Mr. McGuinness could reduce his article to a series of maybe 5 or 6 short paragraphs. And perhaps illustrate each with a cute image and publish them on a website. And maybe some links to his friends as well would be nice. Oh, hang on ...

[squid]

Do you actually read what you write? Or believe in any of it? If you had bothered to do any research, you would have discovered that many Irish blogs have large regular global readerships. The 'main man' of Irish blogging and organiser of the Irish Blog Awards, Damien Mulley has had over 700,000 visits since June 2005.

I'd be inclined to believe that those were unique visitors rather than hits. We get between 600 and 800 visitors a day, Mulley must get at least five times that per day, with nearly 1000 subscribers to his feeds compared to our 40.

[squid]

Take note, bloggers: “60 per cent of the content of the internet is pornography.” That’s called “research”; that’s what real journalists do. It’s normal practice for a responsible journalist like Mr. Waters to find at least two sources for a fact like this. “Now how seriously would we take a newspaper of which that was true?” That’s called a “rhetorical question” – one of the litany of stylistic devices which Mr. Waters can call upon after his years of experience as a salaried man of letters. “Oh I think this. No I think that.” Mr. Waters is perceptively pointing out that blogs typically consist of mere opinion, unsupported by any original reporting, whereas what Mr. Waters writes for the Irish Times is not bitter, incoherent, uninformed waffle; it is indeed The Truth. Be in no doubt Mr. Waters, we take you and your newspaper just as seriously as you do.

I will try to remember that the next time I see the Irish Times on the same news stand as nutz zoo playboyetc

[aphrodite]

Gosh - interesting facts! I did not know the top bloggers only got a few hundred visitors a day. Silly me!

[Ronan]

"As for it being the longest article ever, maybe Mr. McGuinness could reduce his article to a series of maybe 5 or 6 short paragraphs. And perhaps illustrate each with a cute image and publish them on a website. And maybe some links to his friends as well would be nice. Oh, hang on ..."

it's 5600 words. I'm amazed it got published anywhere but a blog!

brevity is clarity, this is one of the central tenets of the mainstream media even more than blogs, despite what you seem to think.

you'd swear if he made the piece 10000 words it'd be even more intellectual regardless of what it said.

fuck it why not go the whole hog and write 20000 words, then there'd be even more information in there, and an even better piece!

[Jay Lyden]

Ronan you are right, brevity is clarity - Im only poking fun at the comment about the length. I dont think its a long article. And theres very little redundancy in there, he's an economical enough writer who happens to be making a lot of points. Slightly related, an interesting article about brevity and clarity as applied to the literary canon, from a crowd famed for their long articles.... http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_gopnik
ironically its an abstract, you can get the full version in the print edition.
i suppose articles feel longer when they are backlit on high contrast screens. sure thats another rant.

[John]

Surely the key difference between blog and printed articles is that the printed ones are edited, thus go through some kind of review process?

This provides a fair basis for the contention that printed articles are of higher quality.

Granted, more and more printed articles show signs of little or no editorial review, most notably in the spelling and grammar.

[Justin Mason]

I quite liked the article -- some serious comprehension failures in the comments here! A few comments of my own:

'Though there are probably thousands of Irish blogs, only a handful manage to attract more than a few hundred readers a day and none manage to make any money out of it.'

First off, for what it's worth, there are just under a thousand Irish blogs, by my reckoning: http://taint.org/technorati/full.html

Secondly, quite a few make money out of it; my AdSense account demonstrates this nicely. The MSM fails to fact-check, yet again! ;)

I was discussing the Irish newspaper industry's blog-phobia with some mates recently. We concluded that it's a byproduct of their status as a specialist, secondary news source.

The older generation, and offline country folk, are now the primary readership for Irish broadsheets (I'm ignoring tabloids here). Most of the people who would be comfortable with reading online news -- young, middle-class, urban users -- now tend to read the English papers, either online, or on paper, as their primary news source.

Of course, this may be partly *because* the Irish papers haven't bothered their arses getting their stuff online in a useful way.

[JL Pagano]

Have you ever been standing at a bus stop in the pouring rain for over an hour, then when it finally arrives someone strolls out of their house as dry as a bone to get on it same as you? You'd be pretty annoyed at their fortune compared to yours, but in reality they have just as much right to get on it as you do.

This is where the MSM's aggressive stance towards bloggers comes from in my opinion. And in many ways, it's understandable. Journalists have trained and worked as subordinates to get to a position where their opinion is actively sought, then some guy with a laptop and a broadband connection gets himself thousands of hits per day and eventually a book deal.

This is not a debate about who is more entitled to air their views - it's about professional jealousy, and I think it's about time spades were called spades.

[claire]

I think there's still room for some public feedback and interaction between print media and those who are not salaried journalists.-and this comes from Blogs. For example , will Max not read these comments for the benefit of his own writing? If even just to criticize us?

The people who write blogs could be experts in one particular area, into which they can provide more insight than someone who isn't , say, a lawyer, or engineer, or banker etc. Blogs are now feeding a much more complex media in that journalists have access to the opinions of the slightly more intelligent than the average reader. Vitriol of Waters and Max aside; the bloggers are not COMPLETE idiots.

It's true -everyone in the world can't be a journalist, therefore only the best should get paid for it. But you can be sure that those guys still read the blogs to get more insight.

[susan]

blogging can be interesting and can also tell you more about someone than they are prepared to reveal in person.

[Catherine Wilson]

I think blogging is great fun and there is a demand for it by the public and great for niche news content. Blogs struggle as you say however to match the gravitas of a newspaper or have the checks and balances that a newspaper has the resources to provide. A happy medium is to be hoped for if newspapers sales and print ad sales continue to decline.