The self importance of the printed word

January 26, 2009 by
Filed under: Politics 

There is a rare opinion column by me in today’s Independent. The comment editor was interested in my blog last Thursday and asked me to do a version for the newspaper. But I find reading the piece in print makes me feel uncomfortable, and it’s not just that the sub-editing has taken away some of the balance of the piece.  As regular readers of this blog know, I only write about party politics occasionally, and while not disguising my own progressive leanings, I try to be pretty even handed in my praise and criticism. I guess the problem today is that to have a prominent piece in a national newspaper seems like I am shouting ‘look at me I’ve got something important to say’. Just transposing words from on-line to print makes them seem more self-important.

There are plenty of criticisms of the blogosphere. As I often remark at RSA events, if people in the Great Room responded to ideas they oppose in the shrill abusive tone of many blog comments I would slap them down. Blogging still tends towards polarisation, and few of the many attempts to create constructive deliberative spaces on the net have so far succeeded. But, as I realised this morning, there is also an informality, discursiveness – even modesty – to communication on the net which gets lost in the black and white of print.

Share

No related posts.

Tags: , ,

Comments

7 Comments on The self importance of the printed word

  1. Daniel Snell on Mon, 26th Jan 2009 3:06 pm

    2. The printed word seems to bring things into focus more, intensifies it, where as the blog occurs as a more casual, inclusive and personal medium. Perhaps intimate…who cares if it’s a little sloppy?

    Anyone can blog, and anyone can read your blog; that I think is the potential wonder of it. I was featured in the Guardian week before last, it seemed important to my mum at least. There is heritage there, it feels like a club perhaps?

    I also think you may get painted into a role – the press endorse you, you endorse the press. People want to hear from someone that has an answer – it’s easier that way. That said, most of the things you say, seem on the whole, pretty interesting Matthew.

  2. Tom Freeman on Mon, 26th Jan 2009 9:16 pm

    3. “Just transposing words from on-line to print makes them seem more self-important”

    I wouldn’t worry too much, Matthew – more and more of us get newspaper content online, so this distinction blurs. My own daily fix covers the broadsheets’ opinion pages and at least a dozen blogs, and I have little in the way of expectation that one medium will have more important things to say than the other.

  3. matthewtaylor on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 8:24 am

    4. Thanks for those kind words Daniel. My mother too treats my blog as an indulgence but gets very excited when I’m in the proper papers

  4. matthewtaylor on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 8:28 am

    5. Fair point Tom. It would be fascinating to know how much the medium matters. I spoke recently to a BBC journalist with a widely read blog. He said the difference in tone between what he said on camera and in his blog was real but subtle. He couldn’t say anything in his blog he couldn’t defend as fair comment but people accepted a more discursive and personal tone in the blog.

    Thanks for reading

  5. William Shaw on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 9:07 am

    6. What you’ve put your finger is how important context is. Op-ed or opinon pieces in newspapers acquire gravitas because they are in a newspaper. Newspapers have an authority gained partly from tradtiion, but mostly from the fact that their journalists – who provide the context for op-ed pieces – really are reporting real news; they are in the places we can’t go, whether that’s the front line in Helmand or the back room in parliament. They gain authority – self-importance maybe – from the hard reality they engage with on a daily basis.

    The blog however only has the authority of the author. This frees the blogger to write far more discursively.As a result, the blog has become an extraordinary milieu for real radical thought, however shrill it sometimes is. The downside of this is that blogs, and other net forms still don’t have the authority of the newspaper.

    The problem is that the authority of the newspaper is evaporating partly because it is being undermined by new media. Circulations are plumetting. Advertising revenue was disappearing from old media and moving towards the net long before the credit crunch. Last week we heard that the New Statesman was slashing its staff.

    The problem is that new media still has to acquire real authority. It has sucked the energy out of old media without replacing its role as a contemporary researcher of day-to-day events in politics and culture. Too often the internet simply reflective, reporting on material that’s been unearthed in the ailing daily press.

    I believe the areas of the internet that invest in their research and journalism will be the ones that acquire the broader authority that the net still doesn’t have. That’s why initiatives like the RSA which take the internet as seriously as they do are the real way forward. They don’t just regard the internet as a way to comment on existing material, but they believe that the process of research inevitably involves the internet and creating new content for it that reflects on what’s happening right now in the world.

    (I would say that, though, wouldn’t I?)

  6. Hopi Sen on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 5:06 pm

    7. The one advantage with blogs over the printed press is that you get to write a response which is longer than the original article… which I’ve chosen to do over on my blog…

    http://hopisen.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-ceasefire-no-asymmetric-war/

  7. matthewtaylor on Fri, 30th Jan 2009 8:12 am

    8. Thanks William (or should I call you MVP?)

    Great post and I agree with every word especially “It has sucked the energy out of old media without replacing its role as a contemporary researcher of day-to-day events in politics and culture”

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!