Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, takes on the new medium of the internets in The New Yorker. Yes, he does discuss Glenn Reynold's book. While terming blogs "amateur hour," (surely there is truth in that), he also notes the long history of such sorts of publications. A quote:
The “new media” of later Stuart Britain were pamphlets and periodicals, made possible not only by the advent of the printing press but by the relaxation of government censorship and licensing regimes, by political unrest, and by urbanization (which created audiences for public debate). Today, the best known of the periodicals is Addison and Steele’s Spectator, but it was one of dozens that proliferated almost explosively in the early seventeen-hundreds, including The Tatler, The Post Boy, The Medley, and The British Apollo. The most famous of the pamphleteers was Daniel Defoe, but there were hundreds of others, including Thomas Sprat, the author of “A True Account and Declaration of the Horrid Conspiracy Against the Late King” (1685), and Charles Leslie, the author of “The Wolf Stript of His Shepherd’s Cloathing” (1704). These voices entered a public conversation that had been narrowly restricted, mainly to holders of official positions in church and state. They were the bloggers and citizen journalists of their day, and their influence was far greater (though their audiences were far smaller) than what anybody on the Internet has yet achieved.
Read the entire interesting piece. My opinion? No blog, or blog cartel, can put out the material of the Sunday NYT. Bloggers are people who like to write and think but who have day jobs, and they are often people who find their views under-represented, or non-represented, in the MSM, and want to spread them around as best they can. If Murdoch bought the NYT, 50% of the blogs would wither on the vine, and Captain Ed might have a new job in New York.
