James Lileks: The Blog of the Year, or the Year of the Blog?

Time magazine has named a Person of the Year — it's that Bush fellow you may have heard about. (He's been in all the papers.) The choice may strike some as smart or obvious, but you just know some staffers wanted to give the honor to those new single-serve coffee-pod machines.

Hey, Time named the computer in '82, so there's precedent for giving the honor to an inanimate object. And the coffee-pod machines have the added virtue of NOT BEING THAT USURPING CHIMP! But to no avail. Trying to push from their minds the thought of Michael Moore gently weeping in the lobby of his apartment as he unrolls his Time from the mailbox, the editors made their decision.

A no-brainer, President Bush. (Take that as you please.) But more interesting was the award for "Blog of the Year." The honoree — Power Line, at powerlineblog.com — is part of a loose band of confederates who delight in bringing the old media order down. Time's choice sounds a little defensive, as if it has discovered that the best way to deal with barbarians inside the gate is to grant them citizenship and hope they behave.

Obligatory old-media insert: What's a blog? Sorry. If you have to ask, it's too late for you. Granted, the very word is ugly — something your dog coughs up, or a slimy creature you find under a hosta leaf. (Or both.) But the very fact that Time can say "Blog of the Year" as if we all know what it means shows how far the medium has come. No one has to explain what the AM in AM radio stands for, either.

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The Blog of the Year, or the Year of the Blog?
by James Lileks
Time magazine has named a Person of the Year -- it's that Bush fellow you may have heard about. (He's been in all the papers.) The choice may strike some as smart or obvious, but you just know some staffers wanted to give the honor to those new single-serve coffee-pod machines.
Hey, Time named the computer in '82, so there's precedent for giving the honor to an inanimate object. And the coffee-pod machines have the added virtue of NOT BEING THAT USURPING CHIMP! But to no avail. Trying to push from their minds the thought of Michael Moore gently weeping in the lobby of his apartment as he unrolls his Time from the mailbox, the editors made their decision.
A no-brainer, President Bush. (Take that as you please.) But more interesting was the award for "Blog of the Year." The honoree -- Power Line, at powerlineblog.com -- is part of a loose band of confederates who delight in bringing the old media order down. Time's choice sounds a little defensive, as if it has discovered that the best way to deal with barbarians inside the gate is to grant them citizenship and hope they behave.
Obligatory old-media insert: What's a blog? Sorry. If you have to ask, it's too late for you. Granted, the very word is ugly -- something your dog coughs up, or a slimy creature you find under a hosta leaf. (Or both.) But the very fact that Time can say "Blog of the Year" as if we all know what it means shows how far the medium has come. No one has to explain what the AM in AM radio stands for, either.
Full disclosure: This writer knows the Power Line guys, and has a Web site of his own. Good thing, too; the Internet is going to make gigs like this obsolete, once enough people realize that some guy in his basement is capable of turning out commentary as insightful as a tenured eminence who was handed a column 30 years ago and has spent the last 10 coasting on a scoop from the Reagan years. It takes dynamite to get some writers out of the paper.
In the new media, however, a clever blog can spring up overnight and get 100,000 readers in a day. That number can quickly fall to zero if the blogger gets a terminal case of the stupids.
What's more, if the blog allows comments, the readers can grapple with the writer on the very blog itself, which is like a columnist standing outside the newspaper building 24/7, arguing with anyone with a gripe. This is new. Bloggers question authority, as the beloved college T-shirt slogan has it. Isn't that good?
Apparently not, if the authority you're questioning is Dan Rather. Another blogger, a D.C.-based political snark-vendor called Wonkette, sniffed at bloggers' accomplishments to Newsweek:
"I think they did a disservice to the debate because they made the debate about the documents and not about the president of the United States. There was another half to that story that had to do with verifiable events of what Bush may have been up to."
Here we learn the flaw of the blogs: Instead of going after the real truth, which is that George W. Bush is a stupid evil Jesus-freak AWOL Hitler, agenda-driven bloggers concentrated on the falsehood put forth to advance the truth. In short: They get in the way. At the most inconvenient times.
In a sense, blogging is so 2004. The next big thing will be videoblogs. You can fit a rudimentary TV studio in a suitcase -- a laptop, a camcorder, a few cables, and a nearby Starbucks with Wi-Fi you can leech onto to upload your reports. This too will be good. One hundred thousand pairs of eyes looking high and low, versus CBS' staring monocular orb. We'll all turn to the nets to see what they think we should think. And then we'll hit the blogs for the rest of the story.
It's the end of the old media, but only the start of the new. If blogs dispensed single-serve rations of French roast, they would have owned that Time cover.
Who will win the award next year? No idea -- because the blog probably doesn't exist. It'll be born to comment on a big event that hasn't yet happened. And in a month it'll have twice the readership of the New Republic.
Dec. 22, 2004

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