Peoria Pundit

By Billy Dennis on March 24th, 2006

Kiyoshi Martinez says that you know you’ve made it when you cited as a official resource in an almanac. He came to this conclusion after he consulted the “Almanac of Illinois Politics 2006” and noticed a section on blogs:

I’m glad they got my address right. Kudos to Archpundit, Rich Miller and Illini Pundit.

On one hand, I’ve get a smug sense of self-satisfaction knowing that I’m in there. On the other hand, I’m a bit POed that even though I’m supposed to be this big-cheese blogger, I have yet to figure out how to turn blogging into a full-time gig.

And then former co-worker DeWayne Bartels compounds the irk I feel by sending me a quote from a blogger/journalist named Melissa Lafsky:

“Every so-called professional blogger I know wants to work for print. There’s still that desire for legitimacy. I’ll admit it: I’ll feel like a real writer when I have something published in print. ‘Til then, I feel I’m faking it. Most bloggers I’ve talked to feel the same way.”

Heh. No, I don’t pine to work for print. The bloom is off that rose. I turn down freelance jobs because I don’t have the time or energy to turn out a good article for the pay you make in Peoria. I have more fun and have done more good by writing this blog than I did working for newspapers on and off for 20 years. Being able to write what I want, when I want, as long or short as I want, without an editor looking over my shoulder is the most liberating thing I have ever done.

The last thing I want is to be in a position where I owe my livelihood to the continued survival of a dying industry. Printing news on dead trees and charging consumers for the privilege of delivering it by hand to their door is a business model that is long-overdue for a replacement. The Internet is going to be that replacement. One of these days, everyone is going to realize that paying a buck a day for a newspaper (hours old news, printed daily) makes far, far less sense than a $10 monthly subscription to an online news service that is always on and is capable of being updated constantly.

Molly Ivins, my favorite leftish columnist, seems to agree with me:

Aside from my own sentimental attachment to newspapers, I have no objection to all of us shifting over to the Internet and doing the same thing there. You’d still have the two big problems, however: A) How do you know if it’s true? And, B) how do you put a lot of information into a package that’s useful to people? If newspapers were just another buggy-whip industry, none of this would be of much note — another disappearing artifact, like the church key. But while Wall Street doesn’t care, nor do many of the people who own and run newspapers, newspapers do, in fact, matter beyond producing profit — they have a critical role in democracy. It’s called a well-informed citizenry.

We are in trouble.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism, run by Columbia University, has a new report out that finds the number of media outlets continues to grow, but both the number of stories covered and the depth of reporting are sliding backward. Television, radio and newspapers are all cutting staff, while the bloggers of the Internet either do not have the size or the interest to go out and gather news. Bloggers are not news-gatherers, but opinion-mongers. I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter — nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened. Or, as author-journalist Curtis Wilkie puts it, “Unless you can cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you shouldn’t be allowed to cover a presidential campaign.”

There’s a line between pundit blogging and being the kind of blogging journalist Ivins seems to be describing. And I seem to be not straddling that line, but jumping back and forth over that line as mood and circumstances move me. I attend city council meetings and report on what I see and hear. I interview news makers and put what they say into my posts. But I also run eye candy — something that I am told makes the site seem more “tabloid” than serious.

It’s no secret that I would love to turn this site into a money-making venture that would let me blog full time, and this would include going out and reporting stories. But it by necessity would require the blog to start becoming less like a blog — with all that entails — and more like the newspapers that I criticize. It’s much easier to be a critic than to actually produce the product yourself.

In the mean time, I’m going to keep whistling past the graveyard as I run this “online magazine of news and opinion” and hope that Ray LaHood, John McCain and their buddies don’t succeed regulating blogs and free speech on the Internet.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 2:45 am and is filed under Watchdog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.