Journalism That Bloggers Do

Jay Rosen writes:

Blowback! That’s what you’re in for when a great American newspaper runs a Sunday opinion piece as irretrievably lame as "Blogs: All the noise that fits" by Michael Skube (Aug. 19). Skube is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning author who teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina. (Bio.)

In 2005, he wrote a similar column for the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C. There he made fun of the "evangelical fervor that attends blogging," and suggested that bloggers were people who didn’t have normal lives, or children. "I don’t know many people who have time to read blogs," he wrote. "None of my neighbors do."

There was a darker theme. "I find myself doing something in my journalism class that gives me considerable unease." What was it? " … discussing that often truculent tribe that calls itself bloggers." That students wanted to talk about blogs as journalism filled him with craft-dread.

Notice that not having time to read them didn’t prevent Skube from writing about blogs, which could be considered odd behavior for a college professor. (We’re supposed to read a lot, then write.) I can’t link to his ’05 piece because, according to Diane Lamb, a librarian there, "Skube does not permit his columns to be available in the online public archives of the News & Record."

Ed Cone, a local journalist who also keeps a blog, called him up back then to ask Skube where he got his understanding of blogs, because his column hadn’t mentioned any. Skube said he had "scanned a bunch of blogs," but could think of only one scanee, Andrew Sullivan. "Given his statement that blogs don’t do real journalism, I asked him what he thought about Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo," Cone wrote. "He remembered Marshall as a magazine writer, but was unfamiliar with his blog, or its new investigative-reporting plan."

Greensboro at the time was getting national attention for its local blogging culture. Skube knew zip.