National Review’s Jonah Goldberg has an article in the American Enterprise in which he tries to bring the hype about weblogs down a notch or two. But Goldberg seems to be tilting at windmills. Goldberg’s thesis can be summed up by the final paragraph of his article,
Should the marketplace show its appreciation by generating significant revenue for a blogger, you know what will happen? A big newspaper or magazine will offer him or her a job. ThatÂ’s why McDonaldÂ’s sells fajitas now. And thatÂ’s why bloggers arenÂ’t going to put serious media publications out of business.
But who, other than Dave Winer and Doc Searls, thinks that weblogs are going to replace the traditional media anytime soon?
What weblogs are going to do is gradually take the sort of niche market that magazines like National Review and The Nation currently occupy. Goldberg vastly underestimates the reach that weblogs have in those niches.
Look at the whole Michael Bellesisles controversy, for example. The National Review has certainly done a lot of original reporting on that controversy, but when Glenn Reynolds posted a link to a PDFed law review article on the topic, around 100,000 people (including myself) downloaded it. Does National Review have that kind of reach? I doubt it?
Besides, most of the right and left weblogs represent versions of liberalism and conservatism that often fly in the face of the orthodoxy that afflicts The National Review and The Nation and acts as a filter on what they publish (besides which, those magazines are just plain boring. When Reynolds posted about how much more fun conservatives have, surely he wasn’t talking about the boring folks who inhabit NR’s universe).