June 8, 2007

If a blogger posts a blog post in the Vast Electronic Forest, and nobody reads it, do the posting and the blogger actually exist?

At times, I wonder about the usefulness of this book blog. Though I'm often approached by friends or colleagues, or by attendees at lectures and book-signings, who say they're readers of the blog, I'm sometimes overtaken by the loneliness of the long-distance ruminator.

And then along comes an upbeat article that seems to put it all in perspective. In these Days of Woe for the print medium (as death knells are sounded for newspapers, for newsweeklies, even for books), journalist Dan Gillmor, who monitors grassroots aspects of both old and new media, has an altogether upbeat piece in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle (and on SFGate). Gillmor, whom I quote in Watching the World Change (page 288), writes about the overall opportunities created when journalists ply their trade on-line:

"[On the subject of] the future of journalism -- as opposed to corporate business models -- there's at least as much reason for optimism as paranoia. The same technologies that are disrupting the news industry are offering unprecedented opportunities for creating a more diverse, and ultimately more vibrant, journalistic ecosystem. . . .

"Deriding 'basement bloggers' and citizen media creators of all kinds, with no recognition of the enormous variety in the genre, betrays insufficient knowledge, if not willful blindness. No, most blogging and other citizen media aren't journalism. So what? Neither is most writing on paper, most photography, most video or most anything else. . . .

"I can name more than a few bloggers whose work I rely on more than the output from traditional journalists covering the same subjects. Some community Web sites are beating local newspapers and TV to big stories. And citizen journalists of all stripes are looking deeply into niche topics that big media ignore or cover shallowly."

That's a breath of fresh air to this isolated blogger, lonely as a logger with a hacksaw at the base of a redwood.