¡Dios Mio! They’ve Blogged Me!

by Rick Rockwell

Today, more people seem to know Andy Warhol for what he said rather than his art. And his comment about 15 minutes of fame for everyone is echoing in my head this week.

I’m afraid I’ve squandered my 15 minutes on a classroom exercise.

Let me explain.

It all started when I was invited to speak on a panel. And then other professors decided to assign that panel as a classroom exercise. Little did I realize some students would be blogging about the panel in real time: a technique called “live blogging.”

Realistically, when will I have six or more reporters in one room hanging on my every word, looking for quotes ever again?

I’ve done the mental arithmetic, long division mostly. If someone spends just less than three minutes with each of those blogs, my fame is gone forever.

Or maybe not.

Because I asked myself, who really reads such things?

Now, that reaction is assuredly old fashioned, various younger people have told me.

However, I just don’t see the pleasure of watching an event with part of my attention and watching blogs react to the event with what little is left over. This is like passing satirical notes in class. Sure, they’re funny with the few who can share the joke, but it remains an inside joke. And don’t you miss the rest of the lecture while you are joking? Or live blogging?

But then I thought about it. I’ve been multi-tasking with multimedia for most of my life. Right now, music is spinning in my headphones while I tap this out on the keyboard. (Pandora or iTunes? Or podcast? No matter, they are all better than over-the-air radio.) In that way, I’m multi-tasking just like live blogging, but it is mixing the internet, e-mail, and music together instead of the combination of live event and internet. And how many times have I read the newspaper with the television going? The same process is at work.

So I’m as guilty as the rest for media multi-tasking.

But so far, I find the results of live blogging rather like inside jokes: they leave me uninspired. For example, one of my favorite DC blogs, the dc universe uses live blogging to follow the TV series 24. If you’ve never watched the program, can you follow any of the comments? This is not inclusive communication, but exclusive communication: for insiders only. My complaint: the dc universe is usually a witty, fun blog, but when it slips into live blog mode it loses me.

So how about an event, we all know, like the Super Bowl? The Washington Post’s superstar sports columnists Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon followed the game in live blog mode. And the results, frankly, were poor. Nevertheless, they inspired other sports writers to use similar techniques in their columns, with the same results.

Think this is all a gripe over how my 15 minutes of fame went down? Not really. I was impressed with the comprehensive overview produced by Tatiana Sapateiro about the panel on Latin American news coverage. The posts on Journo Jabberwocky are organized in a fashion just like a traditional article and don’t have the organizational difficulties of some live blogs. Likewise, Jenn Tyre and Medina summed the forum up on their blogs in more of the traditional fashion. On her blog, CaraS adds her commentary in with a blow-by-blow account of the session. KC’s blog reads more like the stream-of-consciousness style typical for live blogging.

Compare them, if you will, to the student media coverage of the same event by The Eagle or The Observer.

So now that you’ve compared all those links, my 15 minutes is really up. And just like that, perhaps live blogging is a passing fad too.

(Photo by Richard Winchell of Flickr using a Creative Commons license.)

journalism
blogs
media
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