When blogs beget blogs that beget blogs...
Raju Narisetti -
Monday, October 27, 2008 2:21 PM
Increasingly, many of us in print media are coming to realize that content is not king, conversation is.
A good example of that, for me, has been the fact that a couple of recent blog postings on A Romantic Realist, in addition to generating a lot of back-and-forth in comments, also spawned detailed and interesting--whether one agrees or not with those views being immaterial--blog posts.
The first two took off on the last blog post here, titled Whose IPR Is It Anyway? (read original post here) that discussed the issue of intellectual property rights in the digital arena, using the specific example of Mint content being used without prior approval by the Center for Science and Environment on a government-run environmental portal.
The first post is on Spicy IP, a site that says its aim is "to increase transparency in Indian intellectual property policy/institutions. We also stand for fair, objective and accurage reporting/review of intellectual property and innovation policy news from India." It then lays out the arguments and then provides lengthy legal opinion to the merits of the issue looking at the "fair dealing" and "free speech" arguments before coming down on Mint's side of the debate. Read the full blog and related comments here.
The second one is on OriginalFake, a blog on "the politics of IP, technology, and culture in India." While it takes a few detours, when it comes to the law, this post takes the view that while "reproducing articles in their entirety may not be permitted expressly under the Indian Copyright Act"...."the other important piece of legislation...is the Indian Constitution which guarantees the right to freedom of speech and expression and includes the “right to communicate”... To prove its point, the author also grabs a page off Mint and reproduces the image though he actually took a full-page SBI paid-for advertorial (dubbed Media Marketing Initiative in HT Media Ltd) rather than actual editorial content. Read the full blog here.
So, two lengthy blog posts, both coming at the issue from different "legal" perspectives, that add to the debate beyond the debate from various comments on the original post. A healthy sign, in my view, of how technology allows those with ideas and opinions to try and reach out to audiences and bypass traditional media gatekeepers.
The third blog that caught my eye pivots off another Romantic Realist posting, titled "So how many Muslims do I have in my newsroom--and in my life?" that generated a lot of comments in the first place. Read that original post here. Reflecting on that post, this new post by Sandip Ghose, who has a personal blog in addition to the public one he writes called Deceptively Simple, discusses the issues of gays with a provocative post titled "How many gays do I know or have in my life?" (read it here), in turn generating a mini-debate on that topic. (In the interests of full disclosure, while I don't know the first two bloggers, Sandip Ghose is a former HT Media colleague whose professional blog I list as one of my favorites.)
In all these instances, it isn't important, at least to me, that one agrees or disagrees with the views and interpretations. What is more interesting and encouraging is that blogs generate debate. And sometimes the debates can turn into diatribes as there are always those who take blog postings personally and react in myriad ways, including making far reaching conclusions or getting nasty. I, for one, think readers are entitled to express their opinions so Mint's blogs allow comments to be posted directly for everyone to see. But, the Romantic Realist also supports Responsible Commenting at least when it comes to responding to some of the comments.
Earlier this year, I heard Nikesh Arora of Google say that every day, 120,000 blogs are being created! But, the larger and more interesting lesson for some of us who have spent a lifetime in print journalism is this: Newsrooms must move from a mode where writing a story in print is not the end but the beginning of a process that people (readers/audiences) participate in, and that participation is evolving rapidly. If that happens, newspapers might yet get into more trouble but journalism will be safe. And healthy.
PS: For an eloquent comment on what blogging could mean to journalism, do read Andrew Sullivan's piece in The Atlantic titled Why I Blog where he writes: "For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism." (read full blog here)