Only the beginning

  Despite the predictions, blogging is here to stay, argues Margaret Simons IN the closing weeks of 2006 one of Australia\u27s longest standing bloggers, Tim Dunlop of The Road to Surfdom was hired by News Limited to write a blog for them. At the same time Guy Rundle on Crikey rather cheerfully pronounced that blogs were dying, if not dead. I think Rundle is wrong, but there is so much movement in the blogosphere at present? fast deaths, as well as burgeoning life? that now is as good a time as any to assess the state of blogging in Australia: what it is doing, what it is failing to do, its promises and its threats. Blogging is not only an ugly word, it is also an inadequate one. It strains at the seams once you try to include all the things that are going on under its banner. Originally blog a contraction of web log meant an Internet diary, usually run by one person. Today most of the interesting and sustained activity is by loose collectives, thus relieving the individual of the need to post daily, and meaning that sites live longer. Perhaps a better term would be independent internet publishing? but that\u27s three words instead of one, so I\u27ll stick with blogging for now. Before we survey the field, we need to think about what qualifies as success. Bloggers themselves are quick to point out that you can\u27t measure their impact on readership figures, or visitors alone. People come to sites in different ways. Some may bookmark a site and return regularly. Others may be following a Google trail and quickly pass on. One of the most important and radical things about internet publishing is that it takes the mass out of media. People look for alternatives & lots of them. Looking at graphs of Internet site stats you get the big lump up the front, composed of mainstream media sites and then a tail of lower usage sites that goes on, and on, and on. As Chris Anderson of Wired magazine has pointed out, the long tail, taken all together, contains more people than the lump at the front. Amazon, for example, makes as much money from the many books only a few people want as it does from the best sellers. More sales are of books that are not among the top 130,000 titles. And 130,000 titles is, of course, far more than the average bookstore can carry. Online music businesses find that their customers burrow deep into the long, long list of available titles. The more they offer, the more the customers burrow. And the costs of carrying those extra titles is next to nothing. The third factor influencing how we measure success is that blogging is not broadcasting, it is conversation. Sometimes that conversation can be spread across the web with bloggers referring and linking to each other. A fuss started on one site will spread to another, and continue for a day or two, before leaping the fence to another. Readership numbers for a single site don\u27t reflect the full impact of a good post. Having accepted that numbers are not the only measure of success, it is also the case that some blogs are attracting respectable levels of readership. The site that most frequently gets overlooked under the blog heading is the oldest, and the only one whose readership figures challenge those of the mainstream media sites. Online Opinion, founded by Graham Young in 1999, has grown and prospered thanks partly to his philanthropy, but also on the back of donations from its users, ?member? institutions including the Queensland Local Government Association and several tertiary institutions and, for the past year, advertising Young says, \u27We worked out what was likely to happen seven years ago, before blogging was fashionable, or I had even heard the word, so basically designed Opinion Online as a multi-author blog.\u27 It\u27s ironic that even though we\u27re basically the super blog of political commentary in Australia, we never get mentioned in the blogging context. I guess that\u27s because I prefer in a sense to think of us as a journal. Opinion Online does indeed have the look of a journal, rather than a blog. It is also unusual in that it does not come from a declared political position, but publishes commentary across the spectrum. Young claims 342,890 unique visitors a month, growing by more than 60 per cent a year, although this is levelling off. It ranks 21 out of 75 news sites rated by Nielsen NetRatings, and is therefore able to charge real money for advertising. The site earned about $20,000 from ads last financial year, and expects to double that this year. Most of the other uber blogs, dealing with news and current events in Australia have a declared political orientation; but since bloggers leap fences and comment on each others sites, that doesn\u27t mean any blog is uniformly left or right. The best have several posts daily, with fast paced conversations following. They are qualitatively different from the mainstream media\u27s attempts at imitation, which resemble newspaper columns with extended letters to the editor sections, with the original author only occasionally re-entering the fray. Apart from Online Opinion the blog generally agreed to be the best read is run by the conservative journalist Tim Blair, who is a former editor of the tabloid truth and since late last year, Opinion editor for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Blair claims up to 12,000 visitors a day. Many are thought to live in the United States. The Road to Surfdom is probably the next best read Australian political blog, although Dunlop is cagey with the figures. An Adelaide based academic, Dunlop started blogging after writing a thesis about public intellectuals. The title of his blog is a spoof on Friedrich von Hayek\u27s classic book The Road to Serfdom, which portrayed socialism as the path to tyranny and oppression. Dunlop does what journalists do: reads all the papers, surveys the field, stays up with events, and writes sometimes up to half a dozen opinion pieces a day, attracting dozens of responses. Now he doing all this for News Limited at Blogocracy and Surfdom is being \u27minded\u27 by others. Dunlop, generally seen as left wing but describing himself as \u27centrist,\u27 says he is finding the readership at News Limited notably more right wing. Next in the readership league is probably Larvatus Prodeo, a left wing group blog run by Queensland academic Mark Bahnisch. In 2006 Bahnish used his blog as a springboard into quasi-journalism blogging on the Queensland election. His work was also running on Crikey and was sometimes followed up in the mainstream media At the end of 2006 he recruited bloggers to cover the Victorian state election. By the end of the year, Larvatus Prodeo had more than 3500 visitors a day, with some days topping 4000. When Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard challenged for the Labor Party\u27s top positions, Larvatus Prodeo was carrying comment and commentary within minutes of the decision being announced and hours before any of the mainstream media sites. Catallaxy is on the other end of the spectrum, being a right wing or libertarian blog. It has come to some unfavourable attention partly because it has a libertarian comments policy, which means that its debates often descend into abuse. Its founder, Jason Soon, is most unblogger-like in his determination to draw a line between his columnists? who post sensibly and well and the sometimes rabid remarks of those who offer comments. The latter have sometimes gone to the lengths of digging up photos of female left wing opponents and commenting on their appearance. Catallaxy has also achieved prominence because it has been the springboard for the re-emeregence into the public eye of author and lawyer Helen Darville, once known as Helen Demidenko, who caused such controversy by posing as a Ukrainian, and winning a clutch of Austraia\u27s major literary prizes. She blogs here and elsewhere, under the name \u27skepticlawyer\u27. New Matilda, founded by John Menadue in response to, as he puts it, the failure of mainstream media to hold governments to account, is not so much a blog as an internet based magazine, also using the interactivity of the internet to conduct a debate on policy. At the end of 2006 it claimed 4750 paid subscribers and rising. It needs around 5000 to break even. It takes advertising but relies mostly on subscriptions a user pays model. In old media terms New Matilda\u27s combination of supposedly independent journalism, policy formation and explicit political purpose would be an uneasy and probably undesirable mix but in the new interactive world it looks as though enough Australians are prepared to pay for it to make it sustainable to a point. Editor Jose Borghino admits that New Matilda still can\u27t pay its contributors as it would wish. Some donate their services, for which we are very grateful. We pay others what we can. I have been asking bloggers over the last few months what business model supports their work. Most scoff at the term. Nicholas Gruen of Club Troppo, one of the other well read sites, said to me that blogging was not so much a business model as an ecology. News and current affairs blogs in Australia are mostly gift economy, people giving their best thoughts for free or for very little reward. But this is changing. Many are now earning modest amounts from advertising, but they still get less than freelancers in the mainstream, where rates start at around 60c a word. There are two kinds of people involved in independent internet publishing, it seems. There are those who do it for the glory, the satisfaction or some high public purpose, and there are those who do it for money. Melbourne based Darren Rowse comes into the latter category. Known in the blogosphere as the \u27pro-blogger,\u27 he started life as a church preacher. He began a blog called The Living Room to debate questions of faith, and at about the same time started to blog about his hobby, photography. When he reviewed his new digital camera he began getting hits from all over the world. By 2005 he had gone professional, blogging full time and claiming to make a six figure income including from several camera sites and pro-blogger, a site aimed at other professional bloggers. In 2005 Rowse co-founded B5Media, a network of more than 150 blogs based in Toronto. B5Media works on a revenue sharing model with its authors. (Declaration: I write a gardening blog for B5Media.) The result resembles a stable of interactive and linked magazines. Rowse is on his way to being a millionaire and yet his success still rests to some extent on gift economies. B5Media bloggers are expected to post at least six times a week and many earn only a few hundred dollars a month. The advice is to blog about what you are passionate about because otherwise you\u27d get sick of it. Nevertheless Rowse and his colleagues don\u27t seem to have any trouble attracting people to the nascent empire. He is knocking back wannabes, and in 2006 B5Media announced it had attracted US$2 million of equity financing from venture capital companies in the United States. Late last year another news based internet site sprung up a norg or online news organisation, founded and run by a West Australian journalist Bronwen Clune. After a career in newspapers she was inspired by following the Iraq war through the blogs of Iraqi citizens. I realised that this was really something powerful, this form of publishing She founded perthnorg , short for Perth News Organisation, as a citizen journalism site. Her site greets visitors with the words PerthNorg is a news site with a twist you are in control. By becoming a Citizen Journalist you can link, write, record or take a photograph of the stories that matter to you. You then vote for the stories you feel are important. It is your news, your views. So, join the media evolution now. Anyone can write for perthnorg and anyone can post links to news stories on other media. The readers of the site can vote for the stories they find most interesting. The whole site, Clune says, is a creation of its users. So far, Perthnorg isn\u27t all that interesting. Most of the material is just links to other news media, with a few desultory comments. She has only a few hundred visitors a day. But Clune has big plans. She has registered other norgs for Australia\u27s other capitals. She hopes, eventually, to make money from advertising. So what will become of blogs? I think lots of things. Some will become media businesses in their own right, potentially big ones. Some will become cloaked sites for advertising and public relations, at least as compromised as conventional advertorial crammed glossy magazines. Already advertising companies are prepared to pay bloggers to review their products. Some Australian blogs, including Catallaxy, have signed up with sites that bring bloggers and advertisers together on a fee-for-review basis. Some blogs will continue to exist mostly in the gift economy, or ecology. Many will come and go as their founders lose energy and interest. But even if most of them fail, that doesn\u27t mean that blogging as a phenomenon is insignificant or likely to be over anytime soon. The internet means that any time anyone feels strongly enough about something they can publish it to the world. As one blog dies, another will arise. There is a constant supply of new media proprietors and they no longer have to be rich, or even powerful. Can the gift economy support useful journalism? Perhaps. The American journalism academic Jay Rosen has suggested that there are three strands to journalism. The first is investigation. The second is storytelling. The third which is mostly new is conversation. Of these three, Australian blogs do the conversation best and the investigation and storytelling only intermittently. Most bloggers freely admit that they depend on the mainstream media for the facts with which to spark the conversation. Interestingly when Dunlop shifted to News Limited he said he wanted to use the mainstream position to do some interviews or whatever, the sort of thing that most people I have approached (like politicians) refuse to do for a mere blogger. In other words, he was pioneering a new career path into journalism, or expanding the blog into investigation as well as conversation. But Dunlop is being paid, and here\u27s the rub. There are good reasons why investigation and finding things out the essential trade skills of the good journalist cannot be done consistently on a gift economy model. Opinion is cheap in every sense of the word. Finding things out usually entails paying people, because it is hard, dirty and often thankless work. But then let\u27s face it: many journalists aren\u27t doing useful journalism either. One of the contributors to Jay Rosen\u27s pressthink blog, commenting on whether bloggers could ever be journalists, responded: When a blogger writes up daily accounts of an international conference? that is journalism. When a magazine reporter repurposes a press release without checking facts or talking to additional sources, that is not. When a blogger interviews an author about their new book, that is journalism. When an opinion columnist manipulates facts in order to create a false impression, that is not. When a blogger searches the existing record of fact and discovers that a public figure\u27s claim is untrue, that is journalism. When a reporter repeats a politician?s assertions without verifying whether they are true, that is not. Instead of wrestling with blogging\u27s actual potential in journalism, we have tended to fight about bloggers? credentials as journalists. This is a matter of far less importance.? So far, though, no Australian bloggers I know are regularly doing interviews, or searching records of fact. On the other hand the internet has made the conversational strand of journalism essential. If existing media outlets won\u27t converse, then the audience will move on and have the conversation elsewhere. Blogs in decline? I don\u27t think so. They are only just starting. Most Australians have yet to discover blogs, but when they do why wouldn\u27t they like them? The historian Mitchell Stephens has remarked that one of the lessons of history is that if the easiest way to control a journalist is to make her part of the system: give her something to lose. The blogosphere has little to lose, and that makes it uncontrollable, and less risk averse. This will make it one of the homes of media innovation. Margaret Simons is a freelance journalist and author, presently writing a book about the media for Penguin. Photo: fabphoto/iStockphoto.com &nbsp