It occurred to me this morning, after I was only a third of the way through my morning opinion blog run, and had looked at what Andrew Sullivan, Dan Larison, Matt Yglesias, Ross Douthat had said since last I checked, that I can't remember the last time I went first to any of the established columnists to see what they were saying about the presidential race. Well, that's not strictly true: I always make a point to search out David Brooks first thing in the morning on the days he appears. But in the main, I depend heavily on blogs for my political analysis and commentary, and only tend to read columnists if they're linked to by bloggers (left or right) whose judgment I find interesting, and who identify a particular column as worthwhile.
As a newspaper columnist, I find that troubling. As a blogger, I love it. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me Andrew Sullivan was quite right the other day to have said that the Times ought to have given its new conservative slot to a young writer like Larison or Douthat, who have mastered the blog form, either of whom are bound to say something more fresh, interesting and unconventional than the old columnist warhorses. Then again, getting a newspaper column might have suppressed what's best about those guys. I enjoy blogging far more than I enjoy writing my column, because I feel more at liberty to be spontaneous, to make judgments I later correct after having thought about it more or collected more information, the fact that the blog entry can be as long or as short as the topic allows, and because it's a lot easier to have give-and-take with readers.
Granted, I'm dealing with a self-selected audience here, but I'd be interested to know from you readers how much of your opinion and commentary consumption comes from blogs, and how much from conventional newspaper and magazine sources.
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Interesting post, Rod.
I actually started reading more mainstream newspapers' online editions during my brief guest-blogging stint here. Like you, I generally prefer to read bloggers' commentary instead of op-eds from the establishment sources, but I did find it convenient to skim the news and comments from several large media organizations before making my lists of potential blog items each morning (which would then be pared down and altered during the course of the day; I still think of the "Korean 'boot camp' for kids who are online too much" story as "the blog post that got away," since I never did manage to work that one in).
At the time, Rod, I wondered if you got to "skip" some portion of that process partly by being a lot more plugged in, via the DMN, to the eddies and currents of daily news events than someone who isn't in the media might be--not that you don't still gather your blog materials from a whole host of different places, but that some of what you do is so much a part of a journalist's world that you're not consciously aware of how much information you're absorbing.
There's no question that blogs have changed things, and when it comes to political commentary, I think, for the better--instead of sticking around for ABC's talking heads after the recent debates, for instance, it was possible to come here and elsewhere to get quick and insightful analysis and up-to-the-minute discussions of how things were going.
Blogs vs. newspaper pundits--It depends on which blogs you read. I can't comment on very many rightwing blogs, because I'm leftwing and mostly hang out there. But the best leftwing blogs are far superior to most of the NYT columnists that I read. Of course there are probably countless low-quality blogs too, but if you read something like Obsidian Wings (a group blog with occasional rightwing posts, but mostly left-of-center) or Matt Y or, TPM Cafe or further to the left, A Tiny Revolution or Tony Karon's "Rootless Cosmopolitan", you'll read stuff that's mostly better than the dreck in the NYT.
I'm trying to avoid ideology here--I mean that the best center-left bloggers are better than the best center-left newspaper pundits (except maybe Krugman). Dowd and Collins and Friedman are a joke. I can't compare far left newspaper columnists to far left bloggers, because there aren't any far left columnists at the NYT. (If that sounds funny, it means you're probably a conservative or a centrist who doesn't know the difference between liberal and far left.)
Whether the same is true on the right I couldn't say.
Kim M, as promised, I deleted your comment over your consistent pattern of bringing up anti-Israel commentary in every thread. As I promised before, I will delete every one of your comments that do this. Every other person on this blog manages to keep his or her comments relevant to the thread at hand. You should too.
I love the RSS features in the Firefox browser. I use Google News feeds for the continually changing "wisdom of the crowd" synthesis it offers. I use Truthout for left-of-center news synthesis, Rod and others for the right-wing synthesis. I like Grist and Dot Earth for environmental issues and Kunstler for edgy peak oil and economic conspiracy stuff.
I would use the DMN website more, but there's so many ads its hard to get at the "content"
I look at my favorite bloggers -- you, Vox Day, and a quick scan of the posts at the Corner. I find most newspaper editorializing and the bulk of the blogosphere more interested in partisanship than in really addressing the issues.
As a guy who just left radio broadcasting after 15 years for something a little more stable, a bit of research caught my attention last year that portends even more changes in the way people use media: Arbitron diary respondents (radio's equivalent of Nielsen families) under the age of 45 rated the Internet the "most essential" medium in their lives, ahead of TV, radio, and newspaper, in that order. Newspaper was "most essential" to something like 6% of Americans under 45 -- but the percentage wasn't much higher when their elders were included in the data.
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