February 16, 2006
BLOGGER SPOTLIGHT: Info, Please
Today the Blogometer talks to left-leaning Yale law prof Jack Balkin, who leads the legal group blog (or blawg) Balkinization.
What is your full name?
Jack M. Balkin.
What is your age?
49.
Where did you grow up?
Prairie Village, Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City; at age 8 my family moved across the state line to Kansas City, Missouri.
Where do you live now?
Branford, Connecticut, about 13 miles east of New Haven.
What is your occupation? Have you ever worked on a political campaign or for the mainstream media?
I'm a law professor at Yale, and I'm the director of Yale's Information Society Project. I've never worked on a political campaign or the mainstream media.
When did you start blogging and why?
I started in January 2003. The ISP held a conference on blogging in the fall of 2002 and I met Glenn Reynolds, who later convinced me that blogging would be good for me. As in so many other things, Glenn is irresistible.
I started blogging because I was increasingly concerned about the direction of the country and I wanted to express my views about law and politics in public. This concern started, I think, with the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 election. I thought it was important to take public stands on matters that I had pretty much been silent about through most of my adulthood. However, I found the system of submitting op-eds to newspapers and magazines quite constraining; it was very hard to get access and when you did there was a lot of rewriting to please editors (who often continued to edit without one's permission); the result often wasn't worth the extra effort and annoyance. I loved the format of blogs, which allowed me to do political commentary one day, and pretty serious academic writing the next.
What has been your favorite post, or favorite story to write about, in that time?
I don't have one favorite post, but I've enjoyed using the blog to think out loud about constitutional law; I often use the blog as a scratchpad for my scholarly writing. Some of my favorite posts show how something happening in politics stems from how the larger constitutional system works. I'm surprised that I have ended up blogging so much about constitutional law, because my scholarly (and non- scholarly) interests are much more wide ranging.
Describe your typical blogging schedule. And what is your average output?
I often blog early in the morning when I get up, or late at night before I go to bed. My output is notoriously variable. Some weeks I'll publish something almost every day, and there have been times when I've gone for weeks without publishing anything at all. That's one reason why I converted what was originally a solo effort into a group blog, with some very fine people, who, I think, have made some wonderful contributions to public discourse.
Who is your favorite political blogger? Favorite non-political blogger?
Fafblog, on both counts.
Who is your favorite mainstream media columnist?
I don't really have one; but I enjoy Paul Krugman's polemics on the left and David Brooks and George Will on the right always say something that gets me thinking, even when I disagree with them, which I often do. Rosa Brooks, who I've known for many years, is a recent entrant who I think is doing splendid work.
What is your favorite television news program, either network or cable?
I seem to watch news on television less and less these days, because the quality is increasingly disappointing, but every now and then I check in on the Jim Lehrer "Newshour," "Washington Week in Review," and "The Daily Show."
What MSM-produced websites (i.e. newspapers, magazines) do you visit on a daily basis?
I read the New York Times and the Washington Post almost every day.
What non-MSM websites (i.e. blogs) do you visit on a daily basis?
I don't have a daily list, but I tend to check in regularly with The Volokh Conspiracy, Andrew Sullivan, Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall, TAPPED, How Appealing, Legal Theory Blog, SCOTUS Blog, and TPM Cafe (including Matthew Ygelsias).
How often, or do you ever, read a newspaper in its dead-tree (i.e. print) form?
Perhaps only once or twice a week, usually on Sundays.
How do you see the new media and old media affecting and influencing each other in the next five years?
Although bloggers like to think of themselves as bravely checking and critiquing old media, and parts of old media still regard bloggers as uncouth, unaccountable, and unreliable, in fact new media and old media (viewed both as a set of distinctive technologies and as a set of persons and social practices) have effectively merged much more than either would care to admit.
Reporters now regularly use bloggers, particularly expert bloggers, as sources for their stories. Newspapers, television networks and newsmagazines increasingly incorporate interactive elements in their online versions, sponsor their own blogs, and provide linkbacks to the blogs that discuss their stories. These trends, which have begun in earnest in the past year or so, will only accelerate as time goes on, as traditional media organizations work out the kinks of how to integrate interactivity into their business models. (Eventually, of course, broadcast television and internet video will merge as content delivery methods, and online delivery of text will increasingly dominate paper delivery.)
The most heavily linked to opinion and expert blogs, and aggregator blogs (i.e., blogs which primarily collect links to what other blogs are doing) make it increasingly easy for mainstream media to know what is going on in the blogosphere and to use this as information sources, as ideas or raw materials for new stories, and as a rough estimate of public opinion.
Interactivity will transform old media, which will not give up the ghost, but will instead use its considerable political and financial clout to draw important elements of the blogosphere ever closer to it, coopting and transforming them, even though many parts of the blogosphere will always remain beyond old media's grasp.
What mainstream media has to offer the blogosphere are money, advertising and links (i.e., traffic). Although the structure of the Internet guarantees that bloggers can generate some degree of traffic on their own, mainstream media platforms, because of their prominence, will help secure a disproportionate share of traffic and attention, and therefore will become (even more than today) important nodal points in the blogosphere, much to the chagrin of some bloggers and the delight of others.
Of course, the more that old media tries to coopt the blogosphere, the more it will itself be transformed. The result, I am afraid, will not be an unalloyed victory for decentralization or democracy, nor will it represent the end of powerful shapers of public opinion who occasionally abuse their power. Rather, it will instead produce a different distribution of power and a different set of dangers and responsibilities.
Just as political parties learned how to manipulate mainstream media in order to structure public debate and deliver their preferred messages, they are learning how to coopt, manipulate (and in some cases become part of) the blogosphere in order to shape public opinion. Increasingly, opinion makers (both in political parties and in the business world) have a multi-pronged strategy that attempts to influence both old and new media. Although the blogosphere regards itself as far too large and too diffuse to be manipulated by powerful political and financial interests, this is surely not so, and the degree of this influence will become even more obvious as time goes on. Nevertheless, the decentralization of the blogosphere and its characteristic architecture (of log normal or powerlaw distributions) allows a degree of countervailing power, which, I continue to hope, will not be extinguished. The revolution is real.
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