Keith Waterhouse on Blogging
I work hard at not writing about blogging these days, but something always turns up and I’m forced to relent. This one is irresistible for a number of reasons.
Keith Waterhouse is a British National Treasure. He’s incredibly old, being the author of that 1950s smash hit novel and film, Billy Liar. He claimed to be one of the “Angry Young Men” — all the rage in those days — but his sense of humour prevented him ever being angry enough.
He went on to become a very good journalist and playwright, defender of the apostrophe (everyone’s entitled to some eccentricity), and author of a long-running column in the UK’s Daily Mail newspaper.
And it’s to the latter we turn for his views on blogging. Yesterday, he published a piece titled, “Blogging our way to the true story”.
He begins characteristically : “And a happy blogging New Year to bloggers everywhere. I don’t think.” That’s Keith for you. Sharp and to the point.
He continues, “Meaning I cannot be doing with blogging, bloggers or blogs.” He quotes an example of a typical Christmas blog : “Tarquin, as well as being Head Boy, is now First Triangle in the school orchestra, which gives him a place in next year’s Carnegie Hall and Hollywood Bowl all-schools production of Peter and the Wolf.”
But even worse, he says, is the rise of the grandiosely termed Citizen Journalism. “They print hearsay as hard fact. They lift news items from orthodox sources and embellish them in their own wild words. They twist the newspaper writer’s motto, which is Get It First, Get It Right, to read : Get It Second, Get It Wrong.”
Blimey, someone’s rattled his cage. I hope it wasn’t me.
But he has a solution to this morass of unseemly garbage into which he despatches all bloggers : “To all pejorative references to the phrase ‘Citizen Journalist’ please add : ‘– unless they have a camera’. … I make an exception in the case of photographs.”
Here he goes on at length about the Saddam Hussein execution : “The bloggers were there, though, armed with picture-snatching mobile phone cameras. The official photo coverage … was grisly enough. The bloggers’ contribution — grabbed at the gallows … shocked all right thinking people. … the sheer brutality of the scene takes[s] us back to the public hanging of felons at Tyburn in the 18th century.”
In other words, blogging is OK so long as it tells us a truth that mainstream media is locked out from. Bloggers are forever condemned to be bandits and outlaws, stealing banned information and news of private events that the law and other agencies try to conceal from us.
Well, it’s a tidy gap in the market, if a bit hard to live up to on a daily basis. If this is the view of an old-time journalist and general good egg, blogging does suffer from an image problem. But then, we’ve been saying that here for a long time.
I can’t help feeling that if Waterhouse rewrote Billy Liar for our times, Billy would be a blogger.
I think his attitudes reflect a romantic and nostalgic view of print journalism as it was in the days when newspapers were the main source of news and reporters did, in fact, go out and find the story. Getting a story and getting it to print first was the primary goal of every newspaper.
These days a great deal of the news comes from press releases and often they are quoted verbatim. If the general public knew where to find them, they could get the news direct without the middleman. The AP puts a copyright warning on every story they do but many of them are direct from press releases and others are gleaned from local news outlets across the country. Other news sites get press releases the general public cannot access simply because the organization pays a subscription fee, effectively blocking out the nosy blogger.
The job of the blogger is to view, review, weed and sort through the massive amount of information available and choose that which will most interest and best serve his niche audience. I have reviewed and eventually decided to pass up on stories only to see them show up on the major news sites a few days later when they got wind of it. And that’s what I think he may really resent. Sometimes the bloggers are first to bring widespread attention to a story.
“Twist them into their own wild words”? I think what he means is that people read blogs because they like the personality and the writing style of the author as much as they do to get information.
By Andrea on January 10th, 2007 at 1:21 am
I agree with much of what you say, Andrea. Certainly a lot of “news” comes from private briefings from politicians to “tame” journalists, and also from press releases. But it’s often a matter of being in the right place at the right time and having the background knowledge to capitalize on it. Most op-ed writers, which is who bloggers resemble most rather than journalists, review the news in the same way as the rest of us. They just do it in more depth. They are bloggers in print (minus the web bit). These sections of the media are merging now in ways many old-timers find strange.
As for “The Job of the blogger” — the point is that a blogger doesn’t generally have a job at all, and that allows a certain freedom, which often spills over into anarchy, as Waterhouse implies.
What bloggers do have going for them, as you say in the last para, is that they have a unique voice which is self-edited. That can work both ways, of course, depending on the skills and mind-stock of the individual blogger.
Ultimately, if you choose your bloggers well, you can have a great experience. Otherwise it’s a variation on Tarquin and his triangle.
By John Evans on January 10th, 2007 at 8:59 am