3 Turning Points in the History of Blogging
This year marks my 12th “blogversary.”
That’s right: Before Instapundit, before LittleGreenFootballs, even before PJ Media — I AM.
Inspired by proto-blogs RobotWisdom and PopCultureJunkMail, and powered by the free, easy-to-use Blogger platform, I originally set up something called RelapsedCatholic (now FiveFeetOfFury) as a swipe file/staging area for my Toronto Star religion column.
(Amusingly, Blogger itself started out as just a quick and dirty way for PyraLabs staffers to discuss the company’s “real” projects.)
My Toronto Star column is long gone, but my blog is still up. So are thousands of others.
But in those early days, I could complete my morning blog-reading rounds before finishing my first coffee.
One of those must-reads was the Drudge Report, of course. One Tuesday morning, at the top of its third column, Matt posted a tiny photo and a one-line “breaking” story: reports of a small plane hitting the World Trade Center.
“Not another Kennedy,” I tsked, remembering John Jr.’s death not long before.
Sadly, no.
9/11
Most received wisdom is wrong, but I can attest to the accuracy of the cliche that “the blogosphere” was birthed in the ashes of the WTC.
Instantaneously alienated from my last remaining leftist friends (and living in one of the farthest-left cities on the continent), I took to the web searching for others as pissed off as I was — people who weren’t fretting about “root causes” or that “backlash against Muslims” that never materialized.
Ironically, my search got a boost in the (what we’d later call “dead tree”) pages of Canada’s newest paper, the National Post.
The Post’s Robert Fulford, an eminence grise of Canadian newspapers, regularly steered his readers to Arts and Letters Daily, another proto-blog.
Fulford acknowledged that A&LD – a simple, elegant daily aggregator — violated everything he’d learned over five decades in the business: that is, the site attracted readers with the express purposed of sending them to other websites.
It was the Miracle on 34th Street business plan (assuming A&LD even had something as grandiose as a “business plan” at all).
And that paradoxical strategy was working. Sort of. Somehow. (A&LD wasn’t exactly raking in millions of dollars in revenue, and isn’t doing so today, either.)
At the time, blogs were widely dismissed by old-media types as laughably quotidian personal diaries. Fulford was one of the first of his ilk to sense that these online journals could easily be (virtually) rolled up and used as megaphones, too. This hyperlinking stuff just might be, mused Fulford, the future of news.
Slowly, I cobbled together a gang of new “friends” composed of Canadian, British, Australian, and American bloggers – later dubbed “the Anglosphere.” This gang served as a sort of online support system.
Soon I found myself part of another one.
The American Catholic Church sex abuse scandal
In 2002, the Boston Globe published a series about five Catholic priests being prosecuted for sexual assaults on minors. Practically overnight, similar stories were being printed and broadcast across America. Countless Catholics felt betrayed, alienated, and very angry.
Up in Canada, we’d gone through an almost identical crisis in the 1990s. I’d been working at a Catholic newspaper at the time, so I’d had my fill of these disgusting tales.
Nevertheless, as the proprietor of a blog called RelapsedCatholic, I couldn’t avoid posting about these new stories coming out of the States, and adding my own reflections tempered by the Canadian experience.
Soon I was getting emails from American Catholics. They wanted to thank me (or take me to task) for posting on the topic.
I encouraged the former to start their own blogs, to express their thoughts on the scandal and debate what had gone wrong and what could be done to fix things.
Quite a few of them did, and Mark Shea and Amy Welborn are among those still blogging today.
(Meanwhile, their insightful blogging and patient personal correspondence — in the face of considerable petulance on my part — moved me from being de facto pro-choice to pro-life, so I got the better part of the deal.)
Eventually, I coined the phrase “St. Blogs” to describe the organic, pixel-roots Catholic blogosphere that grew up out of that 2002 bombshell.
At it height, “St. Blogs’ parish” boasted dozens of sites run by priests, nuns, parish music directors, theologians, canon lawyers, professors, and laypeople from all walks of (Catholic) life.
No doubt other affinity groups could tell similar stories about how their online communities grew and evolved.
Rathergate
I hate to bring this up, but it looks like some of the “evidence” relied upon to take down Dan Rather in 2004 – and win – was… a bit off…
That’s a crappy ending to a thrilling David vs Goliath saga: obscure websites with crazy names challenge the veracity of a Big Three news story.
The segment in question – about then-President George W. Bush’s service in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War — aired on CBS’s flagship 60 Minutes, which has weathered only a handful of lawsuits – that is, challenges to its accuracy and integrity — during its over four decades on the air.
LittleGreenFootballs didn’t do anything as 20th century as sue 60 Minutes. Instead, it posted a reader’s assertion that the documents CBS relied on couldn’t possibly be authentic; that typewriters in the 1970s supposedly weren’t equipped with the fonts visible on the televised memos.
Rathergate forced what we were starting to call “the mainstream media” monopoly to acknowledge it finally had competition: a populist platform with no barrier to entry and which wasn’t handicapped by deadlines; costly unionized printers and their strict schedules; the uncertain price of newsprint; and a byzantine office hierarchy preserving “traditions” of questionable relevance, like “subjectivity.”
As 2005 rolled around, it became clear that while these upstart bloggers may or may not be wearing pajamas, they were now a force to be reckoned with.
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More on New Media at PJ Lifestyle:
It’s my hope to read your blog long after the New York Times is in the dust bin of history!
No one can argue that the internet broke the strangle-hold of the MSM. Bloggers became the 21st Century media shocktroopers who successfully kicked the obsolete MSM in its shrivelled progressive balls repeatedly.
Funny how things evolve. The original purpose of the internet was to serve as a vast porn library.
Even crapfests like Donahue’s show served a purpose; they brought the issue of child sexual abuse into the limelight and forced the RC Church to confront not only the evil within its ranks, but also their protection of those individuals.
(Let’s pause for a moment and give credit where it’s due. Donahue must have been in decent physical condition for him to be running up and down those aisles with the mic.)
Agree on that aspect of Donohue’s career: he did a show on Catholic priest-abusers a few years before the Boston papers ran their expose.
However, I think he (perhaps accidentally) normalized a culture of complaint and victimhood, esp. among women. His attempts to “empower” them ultimately has made many of them/us whiners or restless “seekers” on the prowl for the latest trendy problem: multiple personality, recovered memory, satanic abuse etc.
And here’s to another 12, twice over, with lots, and lots, of Sun segments.
Thanks Muni!
9/11 wasn’t broken by the web. Most people got it via TV & radio.
If you are going to include Drudge as a blogger why wouldn’t you mention Monica? He did manage to get a president impeached.
I agree with your thoughts about Monica’s dress being a watershed moment in blogging. 9/11 was most definitely a television moment because it was so visual and so BIG. I also don’t see how 2002 defined the sex abuse scandal. It was big in the news before then, in the 90′s (I remember this vividly because I had infant sons and a rather visceral reaction to the story). I can see how the internet made it easier for victims to come forward but it was old news by 2002, at least for me.
Happy “blogversary”!
Don’t read too much into the touted quotes from “Buckhead”. He doesn’t seem to think the Texas Monthly story portrayed his point of view quite right…and in any event, the facts he admits being wrong about were irrelevant.
I’ve always known that proportional spacing and such was possible on some deluxe Selectrics back in the early ’70s. But that didn’t give me a moment’s pause during the Rather scandal. The odds that that technology would be in the hands of, and fully taken advantage of by, some random National Guard officer in writing up brief memos for his personal use were nil.
And the graphic put up on LittleGreenFootballs was irrefutable (and easily reproduceable). Occam’s Razor flat-out demanded that we conclude the memos were typed up in Microsoft Word with the default settings–and this hasn’t changed. End of story.
What *is* possible is that Gunga Dan’s side may have had a point with the “fake but accurate” defense. But that relates to the intriguing lacunae in, and gossip about, the story of George W. Bush’s National Guard years…which was the main theme–or at least the only sensible one–of the Texas Monthly story.
Thanks for letting me know!
Bingo.
And, there was more to it than mere proportional fonts.
I’ll second the notion that internet communicating came into its’ own in the aftermath of 9/11.
Within a month of that obscene declaration of religious warfare, the sort of people responsible for making western civilization crazy were being exposed online, where before then it was ‘leave it to the experts’.
http://print.indymedia.org/news/2001/10/923_comment.php
I think the rise of bloggers is really about what the Major Media Machine tries to bury or where they mislead.
My list is:
Monica’s blue dress, as mentioned above, since the story was spiked as part of the real “War on Women”
9/11 (not the attack but the “chickens roosting” apology tour)
Valerie Plame and the fraudulent CIA leak (if it weren’t for blogs Libby would be on Death Row, Bush impeached, and the media still doesn’t report it correctly)
Rathergate (the crowning achievement of the “fake but true” networks)
Child sex abuse by Public School officials (not really covered anywhere though)
PorkBusters (people forget that before the TEA Party the citizens were aligned against wasteful GOP spending)
Climate Change (the fight against the hoax is very anti-totalitarian thug media)
ClimateGate (the East Anglia emails and data suppression)
ObamaCare (the “real” press was in full spin mode and the GOP was nowhere in sight when the fight started)
The TEA Party (a bunch of bathrobe clad bitter clingers if ever I saw one, and largely a result of bloggers)
Fast and Furious (if it weren’t for blogs it would just be a movie and it’s a counter to the MSM’s “We blog too!” meme)
If we’re counting Drudge as a “blog” of sorts, then the actual first turning point was Drudge’s original scoop about Monica Lewinsky.
Kathy, as I remember, your link to some evidence to the Rathergate scandal being a bit off is nothing new and did not help Rather much because there were contemporary memos available from the Texas National Guard where Bush was being transferred out as Vietnam was initially being won without more fighters being deployed over. The Texas National Guard did not have whatever cutting edge multi million dollar printing equipment that could do superscripts and proportional printing that existed but it did not use. So if Buckhead conceded the point, the Microsoft default argument, which Rather could not respond to, nor the absence of an original, nor the chain of custody confusion, nor the bias motive of the source or the recipients of the dubious copies, nor the lack of reportorial skepticism, nor the absence of any real temporal relevance of the story (a guy who flies supersonic fighter planes during war time, born with multiple gold plated spoons in his mouth, who does so to emulate a father who splashed into the Pacific while flying war planes against the Japs, is supposedly a coward? I don’t even get the story, or what it is supposed to mean. And the election timing of course was ludicrous.). Rather I always thought was too stupid, transparent and supercilious to be a newman. Conkrite I got. Rather, no.
And I helped! As a READER. I read them all, commented on some, and kept thinking I should do this. But I didn’t, not until a few years ago, mainly for our local tea party group.
I don’t think the Republicans really get the internet yet. I know many in the Tea Party don’t. For those who do, we have managed to do a slight turn around.
I have many people I send links to for all those blogs they don’t read. They are happy to get them, but still tell me, “Oh, I don’t read the internet, just what you send.” Most of them are younger than I am, I am 75 and I GET IT.
AND I SAY THANK YOU FOR DOING IT FOR SO LONG AND STARTING IT MANY YEARS AGO!
How could you talk about Rathergate and not mention FreeRepublic? Even Time Magazine acknowledged their role.
More important and less reported:
The purpose of the Sixty Minutes report was to impugn Bush. Sixty Minutes asserted he pulled strings to get into the Air National Guard so as to avoid Viet Nam. George W was a Volunteer for Viet Nam assignment AND the producers of the hit piece KNEW this when they produced and aired the piece.
Great article, Kathy. Happy blogversary!
I’m one of those who discovered blogs shortly after 9/11. I was familiar with Drudge and his role in the blue dress affair, but I don’t remember seeing any blogs before that date.
After 9/11 I started obsessively checking the internet for news. I followed links and stumbled onto the early blogs. I began reading Steven den Beste, Belmont Club, Little Green Footballs, Rachel Lucas, Michele Catalano’s A Small Victory, James Lileks, and maybe a couple of others. I remember your name from that time period, and Five Feet of Fury was always my favorite blog name. Yet somehow I never became a regular reader of your blog. Sorry. So much internet; so little time.
I don’t remember in what order I found those blogs. They always linked to each other back then. I do remember Bill Whittle starting out as a commenter on Rachel’s blog before he started Eject!Eject!Eject!.
So in my mind, 9/11 was definitely what put blogs on the map. I was not Catholic, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the child abuse scandal. But then Rathergate was another milestone.
I work in a printing shop, so I knew exactly what they were talking about with proportional spacing and so on. I was amused to see the IBM Selectric Composer become a topic of discussion on the evening news, since I had had some training on it when I started my job in 1990. But I quickly gravitated to the computer for typesetting. My boss paid about $5000 for it in the early 70s. Today it sits, forlorn and forgotten, under a dust cover beneath a table in my office.
In 2004 I thought that Rathergate was the death knell for Old Media. But they learned their lesson, and circled the wagons around Obama in 2008, allowing no contrary information to see the light of day. Now, in 2012, they’ve in full-blown Pravda mode. They’ve gone beyond partisan bias to self-parody. Today, people who rely on the MSM for their information are hopelessly brainwashed with government propaganda.
The sooner they die off the better, but I fear that they can still do massive damage to our society. As I’m fond of saying, the difference between Soviet media and American media is that the editors and reporters of Pravda told lies and spread propaganda for fear of being sent to the gulag. The American media does it willingly.
Somebody ought to write a book about the early days of blogging. This article is a good start.
I’m a daily visitor to Five Feet of Fury and eaglerly await each new PJ Post. Please keep up the great work, Ms. Shaidle.