[On June
1st, 1980, the Cable News Network (CNN) aired its first
broadcast. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy cable news and four other
significant evolutions in American mass media, leading up to a special post on
one of the best
scholarly studies of media and the Revolution!]
On the
variations, limitations, and possibilities of journalism online.
Through the
development of my own online writing over the last decade (beginning with this
blog’s November
2010 origins), I’ve had the chance to connect with four distinct online
journalistic sites and communities (among many others, but these have been the
four with which I’ve had the most consistent and in-depth relationships). Not
long after I began this blog, I started mirroring it on OpenSalon, a now-defunct
blogging site connected to the groundbreaking and influential online magazine Salon. My first consistent online writing gig (from late 2014
to early 2016) was a
column for Josh Marshall’s longstanding political news and commentary site Talking Points Memo. My second such
gig (from 2016 through the end of 2017) was a column for Arianna
Huffington’s political and cultural online periodical HuffPost (then still known
by its original name Huffington Post).
And for my current and favorite
such gig (from January 2018 on) I write the monthly (previously bimonthly,
but 2020, y’know) Considering
History column for the online version of one of the nation’s oldest
magazines, the Saturday Evening Post.
I’m sure Media
Studies scholars would define each of those four sites as occupying a different
place on the landscape of online journalism and publication, and I’ve seen
plenty of significant differences as well, from their typical content and
intended audience to their visual layout and stylistic preferences (among
others). But I would also link all four through one structure and form shared
by most of their pieces: short-form
online writing, pieces in the range of 1000 words. Having been working in
that form ever since I started this blog, it has come to feel hugely familiar and
comfortable to me, and so using that form for my contributions to these sites
has likewise come pretty easily (while I have worked to adjust my content and
voice for the different audiences in particular). But at the same time I
believe it’s important for us to analyze critically even those forms that we
really love, and when it comes to short-form online journalism it is
unquestionably true that it cannot offer the same deep dives that long-form
journalism (whether more investigative or more narrative) features. While of
course the internet does include great long-form writing (this website and podcast collect and dive into some of
the best examples), I think it’s fair to say that it is more geared toward
shorter-form work, as illustrated by these longstanding and influential sites
and most others I’ve encountered.
At the same
time, online journalism also offers possibilities that print journalism does
not, and in my experience the most important is very straight-forward but
impossible to overstate: eyeballs, readers, audiences. My first
column for Talking Points Memo hit more than 110,000 discrete readers
before it stopped counting; while that was an extreme case (and the site’s 4th
most-read TPM Café column of 2014), there’s no doubt in my mind that more
folks saw and read each piece I published there than ever have a print article
of mine. I know the arguments that “clicks” are a misleading or even
destructive emphasis, and certainly have no patience for obvious clickbait. But
to put it simply, every writer writes in the hopes of being read (yes, even
Emily Dickinson), and that’s even more true for journalism than for
creative writing (which could be said to be written first for the writer her-
or himself). Finding an audience might not be our ultimate goal—for my online, public
AmericanStudies writing, my hope is that my audiences will both learn from my
work and set out to learn even more still—but it’s the primary one from which
all others stem. Online journalism offers the chance to find such audiences
more broadly and more potently than any other form of writing I’ve encountered,
making it a truly groundbreaking form of 21st century mass media.
Special post
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other mass media moments or movements you’d highlight?
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