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September 12, 2007
The New Blogging Elite
Alright, so long as people are actually linking to the Wall Street Journal article on DC's new blogging elite, I should probably explain what I meant by the term. My point, which got a bit lost, is that it's a bad thing. I talk, later in the piece, about how blogging has had a positive impact on journalism, making things a bit more meritocratic rather than a mere Ivy League cabal. The problem, I then said, was that the social network could become just another set of elites -- a "new blogging elite," if you will -- where success was determined, in part, by the same old cocktail of connections, social ties, friendships, etc. That would substantially harm the medium's capacity for enhancing meritocracy.
In part, that's already happening. The hope is that it's counterbalanced by many of these relationship being borne from professional -- or inter-blog -- respect, rather than being preexisting relationships, so it's at least got a meritocractic element at the outset. I knew Matt Yglesias, for instance, as a writer for years before we ever met. On the other hand, I knew Brian Beutler long before he ever had a blog, but my first exposure to him was still as a writer. In any case, my point wasn't that this development was cool and we're all awesome, just that it was happening.
And it's true, Yglesias totally is a ringleader.
September 12, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
"ringleader-of-sorts"
Posted by: rea | Sep 12, 2007 5:33:32 PM
Well, Ezra, Matt and Brian all are really fine bloggers (and quite probably very nice people to know in the social sense as well).
That said, I'm glad Ezra recognizes that the MSM 'beltway cocktail party establishment' exists and that it influences thinking and writing about events - most often in a non-positive manner for the good of the country. Just because the wine may cost less or the beverage is beer doesn't mitigate the danger.
Still, I worry about this as a reader, not a blogger, because I do detect some softballs pitched on occasion (can I say McMegan here?)
Why worry? We have only one reliable alternate voice in the media currently (I'm not attempting to minimize the liberal magazines because they surely help but don't enter many actual mailboxes). We need your uncompromised independence and your best thinking/writing (not what is social network safe).
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | Sep 12, 2007 6:20:54 PM
The hope is that it's counterbalanced by many of these relationship being borne from professional -- or inter-blog -- respect, rather than being preexisting relationships
Ha! See, for example, your (and Yglesias's) constant linking to McArdle. And yes, of course it's a bad thing. If the criterion for promoting someone else's writing starts to shift heavily towards "someone I know in my personal life," that's a really bad criterion, however much you sincerely liked whatever you read of theirs before you started hanging out/living with/dating them. Six months ago the title bar on Brian Beutler's blog read "toiling in obscurity since 2007"; after months of getting linked by his high-profile friends, however, he was high-profile enough himself to get a closed-doors meeting with Barack Obama at Yearly Kos. Throw in the fact that these blogger social circles aren't especially diverse - socially, ethnically, or ideologically - and this is more or less a recipe for recreating old media cocktail party politics with the new media.
Posted by: Christmas | Sep 12, 2007 6:31:14 PM
I think there's an important difference: social mobility. Outsiders aren't rejected for being outsiders; they can gain status by saying something interesting and true. Conversely, an "elite" blogger caught lying, carrying water for liars, etc. will lose status and traffic. On the other hand the likes of Will and Broder are set for life: there is nothing they could do or say that would make them lose their comfy positions (and conversely, someone who refuses to carry water for the Right People will never get into such a secure position).
Also, the ability to hyperlink plays a big role, I think. For example, I assign a lot of credibility to Glenn Greenwald - because of his well-known habit of providing evidence for practically everything he says. After the 100th time following one of those links to find that it proved his point, I'm more likely to believe in the 101st thing he says even *before* I check it. Most other bloggers do similar things, at least to some extent; the ones who never provide evidence of their assertions are less credible because they don't provide evidence.
This ability to make credibility actually depend on truthfulness is what keeps the reality-based blogosphere, well, reality-based.
Posted by: Chris | Sep 12, 2007 7:18:13 PM
Conversely, an "elite" blogger caught lying, carrying water for liars, etc. will lose status and traffic.
Examples? McArdle has been carrying water for liars for years now, but that hasn't stopped her from rising up the blog pecking order rather rapidly. Nor has it prevented her left-of-center friends from promoting her work.
Posted by: Christmas | Sep 12, 2007 7:37:13 PM
And again, there's a genuine paucity of diversity among the bloggers that make up these social circles. In Matt Yglesias's heavily-linked social circle, for example, we have left-of-center former neolib types on the one hand, and libertarians on the other. No genuine leftist bloggers, certainly no socialist bloggers, but you'll find more adherents of those views than you will libertarians. But the big difference here is that Matt Yglesias knows a bunch of libertarians, and doesn't really know any leftists, so he ends up engaging with and promoting the views of one tiny fringe ideology and a bunch of other people more or less like himself, because those are the people he knows socially.
As far as background goes, of course, it scarcely even bears mentioning that all of these bloggers are white, well-off young professionals, and are thus bringing to their view of politics and policy exactly the kind of opinions you'd expect of white, well-off young professionals.
Posted by: Christmas | Sep 12, 2007 7:47:23 PM
Along the lines of Christmas, I'd say if there's some way for outsiders to gain entre in the blogging world, show it. As far as I can tell, the biggest, most successful sites with the most established bloggers, have been pretty much locked in for a number of years now, and, at this point you have an interconnected loop on the left (the young progressive circle of this crowd) and another one on the right (Insta, The Corner, Malkin, Hewitt, etc). If there's something "outsider" that I'm missing, I'd love to know. But I think the point of the article is that she's right - there already is a "blogging elite" and it's fast becoming apparent that it's a closed circle. And I don't think, however well meaning, that the people on either side of the divide quite know what to do about it - with the stipulation that on the right, at least, I think they don't even care. I really like Ezra's work; I love Tapped. The rest, I can kind of take or leave. What worries me, though, is that there's really not a lot of blog mobility that I've seen, and the lack of fresh voices is, at some point, going to be a big problem. And in some ways, I think, it already is.
Posted by: weboy | Sep 12, 2007 8:03:04 PM
I think there's an important difference: social mobility. Outsiders aren't rejected for being outsiders; they can gain status by saying something interesting and true. Conversely, an "elite" blogger caught lying, carrying water for liars, etc. will lose status and traffic.Several problems with this. First: it doesn't matter if a blogger says "something interesting and true" if there isn't an existing network of links directing people to that blogger. The more concentrated the linking networks get--the more a few nodes direct the bulk of the traffic--the less meritocratic the blogosphere becomes.
Second: many readers value not what is "interesting and true" but what confirms their preconceptions. (That's more true of the right than of liberals, but we aren't exactly immune to the syndrome.) For these readers, an 'elite' blogger caught lying (etc.) won't lose status provided that blogger continues to tell them what they already believe.
There isn't any remedy for the latter problem. The way to mitigate the former is for the highest-trafficked, most-linked bloggers to make a concerted effort to find interesting blogs outside of their usual circuit. (And I think Ezra has, at times, done exactly that.)
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Sep 12, 2007 8:09:39 PM
What worries me, though, is that there's really not a lot of blog mobility that I've seen, and the lack of fresh voices is, at some point, going to be a big problem. And in some ways, I think, it already is.I think this is exactly right.
And I don't think, however well meaning, that the people on either side of the divide quite know what to do about it - with the stipulation that on the right, at least, I think they don't even care.Actually, one of the things that came out of the whole Blogroll Amnesty blow-up was that right-wing bloggers are actually much better than we are at spreading the blogroll love.
Posted by: Tom Hilton | Sep 12, 2007 8:13:07 PM
Conversely, an "elite" blogger caught lying, carrying water for liars, etc. will lose status and traffic.
Counterexamples: Jonah Goldberg and Glen Reynolds.
As for the lack of "mobility" among bloggers-- it exists to a degree. Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher picked up an audience really quickly. Diarists at dailykos have become front-page contributors.
However, for the most part, a lot of the blog traffic has rewarded those who had the first-mover advantage. I don't think that's a bad thing-- it's just the way it is.
Posted by: Tyro | Sep 12, 2007 9:03:30 PM
Rather, I man to say that, while it is a "bad" thing, it's not morally wrong, and the first-mover advantage pretty common just about everywhere. The people who started political blogs early and put out material people liked became popular, and that's what Atrios and Instapundit did. There probably won't be another Atrios that will just pop up ex nihilo. Similarly, I doubt we'll see a statup company that gains great success selling computers running a proprietary operating system to home users and schools. Apple exploited that market a long time ago.
Posted by: Tyro | Sep 12, 2007 9:07:01 PM
"The problem, I then said, was that the social network could become just another set of elites -- a "new blogging elite," if you will -- where success was determined, in part, by the same old cocktail of connections, social ties, friendships, etc. That would substantially harm the medium's capacity for enhancing meritocracy."
Indeed.
For example, I find Brian Beutler's blog to be consistently uninteresting. I assume he must be a great guy to spend face time with in order to receive the hosannas he gets from more interesting bloggers.
Posted by: Petey | Sep 12, 2007 10:09:25 PM
I can remember Garance Franke Ruta once talking to Eric Alterman on bloggingheads about why so many young writers initially supported the Iraq war. One of the points that she made was that at the time, most of the young Washington writer types were only exposed to pro Iraq arguments in their social circles, and there was no way for them to get other viewpoints in their personal lives.
I remember being pretty horrified at the thought that people who got paid for their viewpoints on the world were so reliant on their friends' opinions, and not, say, on reasoned attention to the facts.
I remember that every time Matthew and Ezra and the rest mention how friendly they all are. I guess writers always tend to gravitate to one another, but I just wish they were a little more ideologically/socially diverse. That kind of thing can happen again.
Posted by: mad6798j | Sep 12, 2007 11:06:44 PM
Well, it's articles like that one which bring back the loss of Steve Gilliard and Jim Capozzola.
It's not a bad thing that Ezra is showing up on Hardball and writing LA Times op-eds. Anyone who remembers him from a lifetime (in blog years) ago knows he's the opposite of lazy, privileged, etc. And the young-wonk-in-DC social scene will be what it is.
But at some point, the young blogger who goes to DC becomes Andrew Sullivan, in the sense that while you might have started as a blogger, you're now a writer with a blog.
Still, complaining about the diversity of blogs, is a little like complaining that there's no good music on FM radio. You're not looking hard enough.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Sep 12, 2007 11:30:17 PM
Well, I find Brian Beutler's blog to be uniquely thoughtful and interesting. I may have little in the way of support here but that's my honest opinion! Swear to god.
Posted by: Brian Beutler | Sep 13, 2007 12:05:02 AM
Still, complaining about the diversity of blogs, is a little like complaining that there's no good music on FM radio. You're not looking hard enough.
It's not diversity among blogs per se, but diversity among high-traffic, high-profile blogs. Again, this isn't surprising when bloggers end up mainly linking to their buddies: the people you know in real life aren't going to be wildly different from you. Digging around, I can find plenty of good leftist blogs, for example - but none of them get linked by the bloggers from the Yglesias/Klein social clique. I can even find good, principled libertarian bloggers - that is, people who are primarily outraged at the systematic destruction of the Bill of Rights, the drug war, and American imperialism, rather than the "tyranny" of the welfare state - but with the exception of Jim Henley, I don't see them getting linked to, either. Once again, it's the snotty libertarians who get the links, because Matt Yglesias isn't buddies with Radley Balko and Arthur Silber.
Posted by: Christmas | Sep 13, 2007 9:04:11 AM
Digging around, I can find plenty of good leftist blogs, for example - but none of them get linked by the bloggers from the Yglesias/Klein social clique.
Here's a hint: bloggers are not like friends. You don't raise an eyebrow if you hang around in different company every once in a while. Also, it's not like you're inviting Ezra to your house and yet again Megan McArdle tags along to expound upon why something she heard from her uncle's barber's cousin's friend Tom means your furniture sucks. You don't have to read those posts.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Sep 13, 2007 9:25:21 AM
This is actually interesting, though: Who are the socialist bloggers you speak of, Christmas? Given the sort of prerequisite (I run a policy oriented blog and tend to link to policy oriented writing), who am I missing that I should be linking to/promoting?
Posted by: Ezra | Sep 13, 2007 10:10:38 AM
You don't have to read those posts.
Yeah, and I don't have to shop at Wal-mart, either, right? This isn't just a problem of personal taste with Ezra Klein's blog. It's a problem of gatekeepers in the online world. Again, when the criterion for linking/reading shifts from "someone I think has something interesting to say" towards "someone I hang out with in my social life," the discourse gets incredibly limited. This is a problem not just because Matt Yglesias's blog ends up reflecting a limited set of views, but because the much wider views beyond Matt Yglesias aren't getting the traffic and linkage that Matt Yglesias's friends get. This in turn means that fewer bloggers outside of the Yglesias/Klein social circle end up getting promoted to positions of prominence in the political blogosphere, and far fewer end up with a shot at the kind of professional punditry - online or otherwise - that so many in this blogging elite have fallen into. Meanwhile, a hack like Megan McArdle can get hired by the Economist and the Atlantic Monthly in part because of her acceptability to left-of-center types like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein.
Posted by: Christmas | Sep 13, 2007 10:16:17 AM
Christmas:
Just for the record, I wasn't invited to the closed door Obama session. I learned about it and crashed it (in my capacity as a reporter) as anybody with a press credential probably could have if they'd shown up and waved their little badge. Still pretty obscure.
Posted by: Brian Beutler | Sep 13, 2007 10:27:17 AM
So I ask again, who should I be linking to?
And Megan was at the Economist long before Matt or I ever knew her. As a general point, you're vastly overstating our power, influence, and pull.
Posted by: Ezra | Sep 13, 2007 10:27:30 AM
"Here's a hint: bloggers are not like friends. You don't raise an eyebrow if you hang around in different company every once in a while."
On the same lines as this argument, one of my regrets from student politics days is being such an asshole to certain conservatives. Some were very charming people, despite their politics.
Once I got beaten up by three off-duty squaddies, and more of my conservative acquaintances showed concern about the incident than amongst my comrades in the Labour party branch at college was a real surprise to me. I thought the Tories I knew were gits because of their politics; it turned out I was wrong.
[The fact that my self-righteous assholishness also led to me missing wide-open chances to date some attractive girls because they were Thatcher/Reaganites also chafes.]
So let's lay off, or excuse, Ezra's occasional linking to McArdle. She's a very blinkered thinker, but she may be Ezra's friend, and in the end, that counts for more than ideological compatibility.
Posted by: Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | Sep 13, 2007 10:31:31 AM
This in turn means that fewer bloggers outside of the Yglesias/Klein social circle end up getting promoted to positions of prominence in the political blogosphere, and far fewer end up with a shot at the kind of professional punditry - online or otherwise - that so many in this blogging elite have fallen into.
There are two responses to this. One is Gilliard's, and he was right on the mark to note just how bad The Nation was at getting a diverse writing staff.
That's a structural thing, related to the kind of young people who can take unpaid summer internships and low-paid jobs at non-profits or little magazines (de facto non-profits) in big cities with high rents. Then the argument has to be whether it's better to find ways of helping people get those internships and first feet on the ladder, or come up with alternative ways -- i.e. blogs -- to organise, publish and establish themselves.
The other response? For better or worse, being a paid writer, in 2007, in DC for a political magazine puts you in the company of others doing the same kind of work. Perhaps that creates a disjunction between two roles in two worlds -- that of DC-based political writer and internets-based blogger. But in that case, you just start looking and supporting the people who aren't straddling those domains. I think it's fair to say that if J. Random Blogger says something that interests Ezra, and you provide a link, he's not going to turn his nose up at it.
Like I said, I feel as if things at the top are tighter (and whiter) without Gilliard around. Most of all, I miss the food posts, and arguing Premier League football with him. I don't visit the Group News Blog as much as I ought, because LowerManhattanite writes fantastically, and he's as attuned as Steve was to New York politics and Rudy's demagoguery. So I'll promise myself to keep tabs.
Sadly, No! and The Poor Man get a decent enough following, but they're also doing an important political job, because their focus on the batshittiest of wingnuts makes them the equivalent of NOAA for right-wing weather events.
Frankly, I'd like to see Arthur Silber get his rent paid and cats fed without having to beg. But his posts take more than a few seconds to read, and are thus less amenable to what, um, sells.
Posted by: pseudonymous in nc | Sep 13, 2007 11:38:48 AM
So I ask again, who should I be linking to?
I think this may be the wrong question; the issues raised here, I think, are not things that get solved by a blogroll or by a post that says "i found this interesting new voice, you should read this one particular post" (though the latter, I think, would surpass the former in usefulness - I think continuing to argue that blogrolls solve a diversity problem is hogwash, and we all should face that). This is about a larger mindset, one that I think a number of big bloggers share - "there isn't a problem; to the extent that there's a problem it's bigger than me, and I didn't cause it and I don't perpetuate it; and really, I try to include other voices in my blogroll, what else can I do?... and by the way, my friend also wrote about this article, and he totally agrees with me." If the blogworld plans to keep claiming to be diverse... at some point it's going to have to actually be diverse. People who claim mantles of being "just concerned with good writing" will need to bring attention to more than just the same known names with the views that generally agree with their own... and then obvious things like more women, more people of color, more different socioeconomic classes and the like will need some real inclusion. The point for Ezra is you could do more. That's not meant as a criticism or fault finding; it just is. It's the nature of writing and publishing - you just happen to be one of those people, who through a combination of talent, timing, and yes, connections, happen to be in a position to change the way things happen in a particular medium, in this case, online publishing. You certainly don't have to do anything different than you do now. But you can't really say there's not a blogging elite, or pretend that you're not part of it, or, I think, that enough is being done to challenge that elite to expand and become more diverse. That's just denying the obvious.
Posted by: weboy | Sep 13, 2007 8:14:13 PM
I'm uncomfortably reminded of the huge controversy over "Blogroll Amnesty Day". The problem is that a lot of the big bloggers seem to be only interested in linking to the other big bloggers, or (increasingly) solely to their subsidiary "diaries" that keep the traffic on their own site.
Well, that, and the decline in pseudonymity among liberal bloggers. While that's my own axe to grind, I suppose, I think a fundamental advantage of internet discourse is being lost: that people aren't listened to because they're celebrities or insiders, but because they have something important to say.
One of the reasons I respected Atrios and digby and many of the other early liberal bloggers so much was because they weren't trying to leverage their education and/or fame in order to build their hits. With Atrios, it was actually quite a sacrifice, as he found himself being castigated by people like McArdle for his supposed lack of economic knowledge, when he actually knew far more about economics than they do!
Nowadays, it seems like if you don't follow Yglesias' route of blogging under your own name, you aren't going to get linked to by anybody who does. Unless you're digby, and that's DIGBY.
As for socialists to point to, I'd suggest . China Mieville used to post over there, though he doesn't now I think. It was ground zero for the Craig Murray stuff a ways back, and is consistently interesting.
I'd also suggest Max Sawicky, were he not a dirty quitter, and Dan Davies over at Crooked Timber, though he's not quite a socialist per se as far as I know.
Posted by: Demosthenes | Sep 14, 2007 12:56:49 PM
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