WHAT I TALKED ABOUT WHEN I TALKED ABOUT BLOGS: Last night was fun. Blogging proved to be surprisingly controversial. Best criticism: “So isn’t it unconservative to be yammering away about your personal life in public?” (more on this below.) Best line: Gene Healy, on Berkeley’s proposal for a j-school course on blogging: “Isn’t that like Joycelyn Elders’s thing about teaching kids to masturbate? I mean, it’s not difficult…”

Joshua Micah Marshall was levelheaded, pointed out that unlike most bloggers he actually does break news and do real reporting on his site, though only because in the course of his ordinary freelancing he comes across lots of interesting tidbits that he shares with his blog-audience.

Noah Schachtman (oy, there’s no way I got that right…) described a split between bloggers and journalists (the former cast as resentful right-wingers who perceive themselves as being shut out of Big Media; the latter, an irritable Old Guard annoyed at the pretensions of the upstarts). I don’t doubt that this is true–turf battles are a part of human nature–but in my own experience blogging has mostly reinforced or aided my ability to get freelancing gigs. Twice so far I’ve gotten articles accepted that were based on posts I made here. Because I’m (duh) not very well-known, the blog also helps me get my name out in public–Marshall, I assume, doesn’t need the extra promotion. I do worry a bit about whether some of my commentary here will turn off potential editors; but whatever, it’s not worth it to me to hassle about that sort of thing.

Stan Evans, of the National Journalism Center, made two excellent and basic points: Bloggers need reporters (and opinion journalists should hone reporting-type skills before they think they can pontificate about the news of the day–I would count assessing the value of a source, cultivating same, finding stuff out, and most importantly spotting the most interesting details or angles of a story as “reporting-type skills”), and vast right-wing conspirators should not huddle in little protected compounds, but should rather seek to infiltrate the major media. To the extent that the conservative or libertarian parts of the blogosphere become ingrown, they fail to do necessary persuasive work.

I said a bunch of stuff (I was definitely not as cool as Marshall–he’d sketched a couple points on the back of a pamphlet, whereas I knew I’d ramble and make no sense unless I had a detailed outline), main points: 1) Bloggers (Marshall excepted of course) almost never report, and that’s a weakness. Sometimes a story will boil up out of the earth right next to a blogger (as w/Meryl Yourish and the SFSU Israel protest), but that’s rare.

2) Due primarily to cultural reasons, but partly to technological innovations, blogs tend to be less “team-player”ish, less willing to bury inconvenient stories or interpretations, than the major media. I stress that this is only a tendency, not a certainty. But I have found that right-wing bloggers link to, appraise, and even acknowledge the accurate points made by left-wing bloggers, and vice versa, in a way that is simply not found in mainstream journalism. (Two exceptions spring to mind: I think Ramesh Ponnuru is really fair, but he rarely concerns himself with issues on which the left makes good points, so I’m more talking about his relationship to libertarians and supporters of cloning here; and Tunku Varadarajan.)

Partly, this greater tendency to acknowledge what “the other guys” get right occurs simply because blogs have less credibility than mainstream media. The New York Times, rightly or wrongly, enjoys a presumption that it will not bury the facts or report only half the story. A blogger has to earn his readers’ trust, and one major way of doing that is by refusing to play partisan games. As some blogs become more popular, and attain that presumption of credibility, I expect some of the more popular ones will stop bothering to respond fairly and accurately to the opposition; to some extent that’s already happening.

Another reason, which is somewhere between cultural and technological, is that blog posts tend to be short and experimental. Thus if you say something stupid and someone calls you on it, or if someone points out a nuance you overlooked, it’s easy to correct or elaborate without losing face. The NYT can’t really do that. (I think that this distinction between old and new media, like most of them, will either blur or disappear with the advent of digital paper–but boy, is that another story.)

The tech reasons for this greater openness to “the enemy” are: a) hyperlinks, of course–if I misrepresent your points, I’ll probably link to the article in which you make them, and readers can see that I’ve played fast and loose with your writing; b) the blogroll–most bloggers maintain permanent links to people with whom they have sharp and obvious disagreements; and c) comments boxes. (Which I don’t have, I know. And my blogroll hasn’t been updated in donkey’s years. We’re working on it.)

The final nifty characteristic of blogs that I discussed was the personal nature of the writing. Now, this can be either a bug or a feature. It is just creepy to detail every moment of your life, or worse yet, to air your dirty laundry in public–who is reading your site? Why are you writing it? I think last night I sounded more critical of personal-life blogs than I really am–when they’re funny, their appeal is pretty much the same as Dave Barry’s. Tepper runs a very cool blog that oscillates between personal and political/legal; the Possumblog is a durned good time. But there are some blogs that really do suffer from exhibitionism, and that’s lame.

But when it’s presented with a little more care for one’s own privacy, the personal aspects of blogging can help other people really understand your philosophy–the underlying worldview that unites your stances on, say, gun control, Bruce Springsteen, and race relations in Milwaukee. Blogs help show that politics isn’t–or shouldn’t be–some disconnected policy preferences; political beliefs should flow from underlying ethical and ultimately metaphysical beliefs that you live with all day long. (Or try to, anyway.)

That also makes it easier for others to be persuaded–we can imagine what it would be like to live all day as a leftist, a conservative, a pro-lifer, an Objectivist, and we can see that it needn’t make us lousy people. So much of contemporary politics is about personal preferences and affiliations–were the leftists you knew condescending? Were the conservatives rich bigots? Who do you want to hang out with–a Gore voter, a Bush voter, or a Nader voter? Blogs show that there are leftists/conservatives/whatever who don’t fit your stereotypes–there are people who are kind of like what you might be like if you were a leftist/conservative/whatever. And seeing people who you might want to be like can help you evaluate their beliefs without worrying that if you start agreeing with them you’ll turn into a jerk.

Just as Plato wrote dramatic and biographical accounts of Socrates, rather than simply presenting Socrates’ arguments, blogs persuade by showing a whole life. At their best, blogs are an act of life as rhetoric.