My Little Schadenfreude

Everybody’s having fun at Lee Siegel’s expense.

There is one thing about the whole affair that I think is more interesting than just the satisfaction of seeing an extraordinarily bad column lose its place, though. Lots of people have observed that bloggers give away the same goods that journalists are accustomed to making their living off of, and explained the occasional prickliness of mainstream journalists towards weblogs in those terms.

I think in a way that Siegel is one of a great many published writers who have demonstrated that the issue is a bit more specific. Bloggers don’t give away for free what the best investigative journalists and non-fiction writers create. There are no bloggers who consistently publish for free work that is either as informative or as well-written as some of the most impressive published investigative reporters, travel writers, memoirists and non-fiction authors. There are occasional isolated blog essays that reflect impressive research. There are some but not that many bloggers whose writing skills are a draw in and of themselves.

So who really is threatened by blogging? Two classes of paid authors: opinion writers and cultural critics. That’s what you can find for free in the blogs. You can find stuff that is far more compelling, unexpected, inventive or powerfully expressed than you’ll find in the op-ed pages of American newspapers. You can read things which are more interesting and diverse than you’ll find in the major opinion magazines. And to a significant degree, you can find reviews and cultural analysis that is more interesting and covers a wider range of media. There are a few especially witty critics that various magazines and newspapers have wisely snapped up, and the output of web writers can be less regular than what you’ll find in the newspaper. But online writing in this area is also basically comparable or superior to what you’ll get from a publication that you pay to have delivered to your door.

I think that’s one of the pressures that was brought to bear on Siegel, but hardly unique to him. Anyone who is writing for the online extensions of established media outlets is under the weight of the attention economy: bring us the eyeballs, or it’s your head. How do you bring the eyeballs when there’s plenty already out there for the eyeballs to see? Act like a loon. Say outrageous things that bring the links pouring in. It’s not like the online world has ever been short on psychotics, but loons + Big Media Name like NRO or TNR is what separates the average internet loons from the people who produce some clicky-clicky.

It’s kind of pity that the strategy works so well in the short-term (it’s always easier to start a blog thread about a mouth-frothing piece of lunacy than a well-considered mini-essay). It’s a pity because that means that online readers are keeping the big publishers of opinion journalism from understanding the real lesson that weblogs might teach them. It’s not that they should be looking for some crazy bastards of their own that they can stock up on in order to compete with the homegrown crazy bastards of the online world. It’s that somewhere out there in the blogging world, there are more interesting people than the people they’re accustomed to relying upon, that the established publications draw from an overly narrow and mannered world of writers and opinion. The thing that really depresses me is that when the various major magazines and newspapers go trawling for work from these new-fangled “blog” things, they usually find the people who compound the intellectual and imaginative narrowness of a lot of their own writing rather than the people who do something genuinely different.

Or they urge their own writers to act more like freaks so that they can compete with JoJo the Dog-Faced Blogger and his ilk. Either way, bad for Zathras.