Gabe Bradley on Blogs
Gabe Bradley has yet another silly piece in today’s ODE. Behold the Kinsleyesque hubris:
When I write something, I want as many people as possible to read it and hopefully respond. For instance, I wouldnt continue to write this weekly column if the Emerald didnt have a wide enough audience to keep a nearly constant stream of hate mail flowing through my inbox.
Perhaps thats why I dont get the appeal of blogs; theyre not something new to me. Publishing my random thoughts for public consumption is my job, the daily grind, so to speak. There are some differences, of course. I dont get to write my own headlines; I have to write on a certain time frame and follow certain guidelines; I have to ask permission in order to use profanity (shit, piss, damn); also, I have to let other people cut up my words before they see the light of day. In exchange for those restrictions, however, I have access to a much larger audience than is available to the average blogger.
The beauty of blogging is that readers themselves (and not a few liberal newspaper editors) decide which material gets trafficked. Before, opinions were to be found amongst friends and in newspapers, both of which are rather select groups. Now the entire world has the potential of reading an individual’s opinions, well-reasoned and researched or not. Readers are no longer limited to Jenny McBride’s ramblings, your silly pap, or Ailee Slater’s stoned gibberish.
The best part about blogging is that you can abruptly end your piece when you have to go to class without bothering to grammar or spellcheck it. Thank you, Internet!
Okay, okay. Tim pays for it. Or someone. Whoever the fuck is paying for it should let us know. We’ll use advertising money to support this thing. It shouldn’t come out of anybody’s pocket.
The blog costs you virtually nothing. Actually, in all seriousness, it’s like $140 a year or something, it’s not all that expensive.
I believe, at last count, our website was receiving 10,000 unique hits per month. Now, that’s not saying much, and if you check how many people found our site by typing in “granny porn” the percentage is higher than I’d like it to be, but that number is four to five times higher than our print run. And the blog costs virtually nothing. That’s the beauty.
There are heavily trafficked blogs that receive much more interest than this one, of course. And naturally there’s an even greater distinction to be made between http://www.volokhconspiracy.com and http://www.secretlifeofshoes.blogspot.com, but this has nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with the content. If you write well, have some sort of knowledge/opinion, and update daily, people will find your blog. The purpose of blogs is to democratize the flow of information and opinions, something the mainstream media can’t do … even when they have their own blogs — case in point the Ol’ Dirty’s languishing “experiment in democracy”.
Blogging is the wave of the future. That is why there are more and more professional bloggers out there (some of the most respected are OC alums). Eventually, the discerning media consumer will traffic only blogs because the mainstream media is filled with middlebrow horseshit — case in point the Ol’ Dirty’s page two.
Also, at least under Bret & Pete, myself, and T-graf, the OC blog and website has just as large a circulation as the magazine itself, only not restricted to a small Oregon town. Perhaps because our blog isn’t buried with no link from the front page.
Dear Gabe,
Ring back when you learn to breathe through your nose.
Love,
Tim