Saving journalism

A typical day for me begins between 7 and 8am, depending on what time the night prior ended and when class begins. I wake up, hit the snooze button (sometimes twice), roll out of bed and turn on my computer. I check my email, and turn on the live stream of KUT, the local NPR station. I make coffee, jump in the shower, toast a bagel and get dressed. Once I get to school, I usually spend 8 or 9 solid hours between class, the library, socializing, and surfing the web. When I'm online at school--admittedly sometimes in class--I spend a growing majority of my time reading a variety of blogs. My old standards used to be check email, check Facebook, check CNN, check the New York Times front page, read Maureen Dowd. Done. Now my menu has expanded to include polling sites, political mockery sites, old school journalists-turned bloggers, and my favorite, The New Yorker. The New Yorker doesn't exactly fit in with the trend toward blogs becoming my news source, but I always thought of it as the unattainable thick weekly with small print that my parents often "fought" over. A very common conversation in my home growing up:

Mom: John, where's the New Yorker?
Dad: I don't know, you have it.
Mom: No, I don't, you were reading it earlier.
Dad: Well I don't know, it's probably up by the bed.
Mom: I looked there.
Dad, realizing the magazine is under something else he's reading while listening to the TV and talking to me: Oh, I have it, here you go.

The New Yorker was an institution in my house, and an explanation of why is for later, but all that is necessary to know now is that it is accessible to me now, because it doesn't cost me $5 a week to read. However, I do wish I could have the excitement of guessing the cover art...

Anyway, I digress. My point is that blogs have become a major source of information for me, and while I may have thought ill of myself for relying on unedited, unconstrained sources for news three years ago, I think blogs are the best thing working for us right now. This election has proven, for anyone who hasn't realized it yet--eh hem, John McCain--that the internet as a media source is good for democracy. While the mainstream media is busy filming police chases and talking about Obama's middle name to do real reporting, the internet provides real-time information to an increasingly tech-savvy and politically engaged electorate. Youtube videos and blogs are a major part of this election, and not just for young people. The internet, and blogging in particular, has become an instrument of democratic participation.

Maybe no one reads what I write here, but I have paid nothing to be able to publish in the public domain whatever I feel like writing. For better or worse, the barrier to entry into the blogosphere is the electricity it takes to run your computer or the latte you have to buy at a coffee house to use their internet. Zero. Andrew Sullivan, author of The Daily Dish and senior editor of The Atlantic was recently on NPR talking about the future of journalism and whether blogging was going to end newspaper circulation forever. He made a lot of great points and you can listen to the whole show here, but the take-away for me was this: Blogging is somewhere between the written word and radio, because there is a certain amount of real-time interaction between consumer and producer. There are no barriers so as blogs become more frequent, we should expect those that last to be of high quality. Blogs are good at quick post-publishing fact checking, and Sullivan even compared the process to that of academia, but on speed. Blogging is peer reviewed, but at 180megasuperbytes or whatever the hell the speed of internet is these days.

And just to hammer home the point that this is not just a twenty-something phenomenon, I recently discovered, thanks to a friend, Margaret and Helen, which is a blog written by an 82-year-old grandmother who is extremely pissed off and very funny. My Dad learned to text, and my mother likes me to tell her about youtube videos that she'll never watch because she's too damn busy to figure it out. We are disseminating information to one another and across generational lines at a rate that seems to alarm the political strategists that for some reason didn't think the internet would catch on as a campaign tool. And if bloggers can be effective tools for information-sharing during a relatively dirty and monumentally important election, I have faith that they will remain relevant for years to come. Needless to say, I still treasure the Sunday New York Times in my hands, and the excitement that comes with the arrival of the New Yorker.