Now you KNOW blogging is doomed and passe: members of Congress are blogging:
Blogging, the Web-based craft of diary-keeping and commentary, is taking root on Capitol Hill.
The nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation, which helps educate Congress on running its business, says at least four members – Mr. Pence; Representatives Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois, and Katherine Harris, Republican of Florida; and Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont – have taken up the task on a continuing basis. (Others have used temporary blogs to document trips, said Brad Fitch, the foundation’s deputy director.)
The Congressional bloggers praise the power, popularity and potential of blogging, citing it as one of the most frequently visited parts of their Congressional Web sites.
While popular political blogs like Wonkette, MyDD and Daily Kos serve as an alternative to traditional news sources and allow their authors to purvey commentary, Congressional blogs are extremely tame. In many cases, staff members – not the legislators themselves – post entries, and they rarely link to other blogs, as most blogs do.
This is like Eminem suddenly becoming popular in convalescent homes.
But all may not be lost: Ed Cone notes that the Times must be using an awfully loose definition of blogging.
On the other hand, Radley Balko argues that blogging is really not that dramatic a media development as a unique news delivery system — and that along with the good blogs a lot of them simply smell:
“Other than that, blogs aren’t all that different the traditional media. The ‘blogosphere’ isn’t so much an alternative to the conventional newsstand as it is a massive extension of it,” he writes. “…Some of it is insightful and articulate. Some of it represents original, undiscovered talent. Much of it, unfortunately, is garbage.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.