Seizing The Limelight: The State of Blogging
(Over the past several days, I've had the distinct pleasure of collaborating with Star A. Decise of The Enigmatic Paradox on the subsequent essay. News-and-opinion blogs are already influencing the political landscape on tangible levels, and are reshaping the ways in which the average citizen receives information. Here are a few observations on what we can and should do to better serve that audience.)
- - - - -
It is one of the great ironies of life that we so often become our parents. More often than we care to admit, our teenage rebellion comes to naught. We mellow with time and end up repeating the past.
The truism is borne out in considering the state of the blogging art, especially those focused on politics and current events. We've created our "generation's identity" with rebellious criticism of traditional media - yet make many of the same mistakes that humbled our predecessors.
As newspapers once did, we make readers work much too hard to find the information they want. While worshipping at the altar of reader participation and accountability, we are much less user friendly than many newspapers. We don't trust readers' judgments and give them few choices. We're singularly linear in our thinking and layout even though the medium rewards multiplicity.
Many news-and-opinion blogs seem like doses of cod liver oil - they may be "healthy" but they're difficult to swallow. Like newspapers of old, these sites make little effort to seduce readers. They provide many opportunities to comment but expect visitors to follow the laid-out trail of "bread crumbs" like so many chickens. Most blogs' underlying assumption amounts to "love it or leave it."
And we should be responsive to the frustrations of those who choose the latter.
It's certainly presumptuous for someone like me, a babe in the blogging woods, to criticize blogs. But the medium has reached a critical impasse as some blogs, which boast larger readerships than most newspapers, seek national recognition and the accompanying impact. That goal, however, will continue to elude the industry until we recognize our self-imposed limitations and overcome them.
Miracle Grow
It takes so much time, effort and work to blog that, like traditional reporters, it's all too easy to become convinced that the world revolves around our work. We read each others' blogs, we comment on each others' blogs and we talk to other bloggers. It's an insular and all-consuming routine, given that blogging has sprouted as if it's been raised on a steady diet of Miracle Grow.
But we should recognize that we're still the freaks, a tiny minority. We're preaching to the choir. The vast majority of Americans, even the vast majority of computer users, see us as subversive, at best, and perhaps even dangerous.
In large part, especially for serious, informational sites, this is the price we pay for the company we keep. The absence of standards and regulations is the birthright of the blogosphere. It is the quintessential village square, the ultimate soapbox for the brilliant, the perceptive and the imaginative. But it also is a platform for every quack, conspiracist and narcissist with a computer, a cause, and a fondness for exhibitionism.
So the medium's great advantage is also its Achilles' heel, especially in a country whose national pastime is the assignation of guilt by association. This virtually guarantees that the valuable will always remain overshadowed by the fluff, the absurd, and the idiotic. It's just the statistical reality of the game - and an annoying handicap.
If news-and-opinion blogs are going to rise to the next level and become something more than niche players, if blogs want to spread their message beyond the self-selecting congregation, if blogs are going to become trusted sources of general information for the general public, then we're going to have to change our thinking and examine our assumptions.
Instead of telling readers what they should know, we have to start asking what readers want to know and how we can give it to them. Instead of taking our identity through criticism - however irrefragable and no matter how well deserved - we have to acknowledge and discuss our weaknesses.
History may be on our side. Technology may be giving us a boost. But to count, we must mature. We're going to have to do more and do it better.
So in the spirit of Jeff Jarvis' essays at Buzz Machine on how newspapers can adapt to the emerging electronic world, I offer what I hope is the opening salvo in an ongoing conversation. My guiding principle in this discussion might be taken from the scene in Catch-22 when the pilot frantically tries to save the crew of his battered bomber.
All Work, No Play
We too often take readers for granted. Of all the major media, we're among the least user friendly. The underlying assumption in both our writing and our layout is that anyone arriving at our sites is our captive and should follow the lines we draw in the electronic sand. Of course, we want to influence. That is, after all, the very reason most bloggers started blogging in the first place - and giving our audience too many "outs" too soon risks the early loss of an increasingly attention-deficient public.
But if we treat our readers solely as our captives, we'll only lose them. We have to learn to trust them. We need to help them navigate to what interests them. And we need to make our blogs visually appealing. Currently, we simply post "reams" of words and expect readers to slog through them. This hubris may be acceptable for established blogs whose loyal readers accept the authors' apathy towards site design. But it severely restricts their appeal, and is fatal for lesser-known pundits with equally vital things to say.
Nor do we tailor our sites to readers' varying commitment. We seem to assume that every reader is as interested in each post as every other reader. But some topics interest me more than others. I skip some subjects. I want to read only a few graphs about others. I haven't found a blog yet that has a button that allows me to skip to the next post.
More often than not, I'll start a long post, read a little and then decide to move on. But the scroll usually moves so fast that I'm lost before I know it. I find myself asking, "Did I miss the start of a new post or is this part of the post I had decided to skip?" It's usually easier to move on to another blog than to try and locate myself.
And, as newspapers discovered some years ago, that's a form of slow motion suicide.
The inverted pyramid isn't a tool of "evil-doers" and it won't kill us to use it from time to time. OK, we're not the AP. But must we all imitate frustrated New Yorker writers all the time? Too often we bury the lead. Too often, we cast aside discipline and think that long is obviously better. The technology of blogging is particularly well suited to "capsulization" - a graph or two, a la Wall Street Journal, with the main points linked to a longer explanation.
Yet we rarely provide this service. And while original source material may be mothers' milk, do I need the entire, self-serving press statement issued by anyone even vaguely associated with the story. We should summarize and link more often. I know it takes time. But the readers' time is far more precious.
Focus & Choice
Newspapers have many stories on the front page for a reason: not everyone is interested in the same thing. We should use frames to organize our blogs so that readers have an easier time locating stories that they think are important. We should consider separating ongoing major stories in one area of the screen or another to make them easier to follow.
Major newspapers, for instance, now create sections in which they group similar articles about ongoing issues. But we mix stories about Brokeback Mountain with Bush administration spying as if they always speak to the same audience.
The exception that proves this rule is The Huffington Post. It's a pioneer in using its space to serve competing interests. But, unfortunately, it's adopted the tabloid penchant for attention grabbing "wood headlines" rather than the more serious broadsheet layout. Still, it deserves praise for using visuals and experimenting with a layout that permits readers to make their own choices.
But there's no reason not to take the basic idea further. I can envision blogs being divided into sections for different subjects and different types of stories. Like USA Today, they might be color-coded. Regardless of the specific design and execution, the basic thrust is to expand readers' choices and to provide a natural framework of prioritizing stories.
Joshua Marshall deserves a great deal of credit for beginning to brand Talking Points Memo by starting related blogs with different foci and different styles. But why separate them? Instead of countless promotions, Talking Points could run the other blogs in a window.
It's a way for a single blog to serve multiple audiences. That's what The New York Times did with its sections. And it saved the newspaper that was well on its way to the ash heap of history. It's certainly more technically complex. But it shouldn't be beyond the means of the larger, better-staffed operations.
If we want to extend our reach and grow our credibility, we need to proselytize and convert. We need to seduce visitors into giving us a commitment. Otherwise, we're limiting our audience to those who already believe. And that's going to truncate our success.
Not All Posts Are Created Equal
Newspapers learned long ago that a lot of their communication has nothing to do with words. A glance at any newspaper immediately gives the reader a great deal of information. But we've ignored this type of education. We don't provide any obvious guides to distinguish between the important and the amusing, the spectacular and the vital.
We exist in an environment that is incredibly competitive and gets ever more so. But we don't make much effort to be help to our readers use their time wisely. We don't provide guidance. We expect readers to take the time to figure out the merits of each post.
It's wonderful if they do. But, to a large extent, it's our job to do it for them. And why aren't we serving readers who are looking for one-peek guides - or, as they used to say in the movies, "Just the headlines, Ma'am" - by providing headlines that give some insight as to the content of their respective posts?
Template Redesign
A quality blog quickly becomes the whale that swallowed Jonah. I realize that most blogs are one-person labors of love. It's a Sisyphean task to gather all the information needed every day, organize it, analyze it and write about it - not to mention somehow earn a living. And now I'm claiming that's not enough. There's nothing I can say except please don't kill the messenger.
A good blog is performance art. It changes every day, evolves and grows. Few of us have the technical skills to do much more than massage the basic template by adding a frill or two. Take this site, for example. While I've gamely attempted to solve some of the aforementioned problems with rudimentary tinkering, I know there's much more that could - and should - be done.
But we're the victims of pre-ordained limitations in template design. Even those of us with a strong desire to increase user friendliness and reader choices have few options. We have to use Rube Goldberg-ian jump buttons and primitive html tags that often make site navigation resemble a game of Pong on speed.
That convinces me there's a lucrative market for news-specific templates with easy-to-follow directions. Are any entrepreneurial web designers interested? You have a guaranteed customer right here. Or perhaps, a volunteer may be willing to create and distribute some open source software?
Sometimes It Is Who You Know
In the blogosphere food-chain, being swallowed by the bigger fish isn't necessarily a negative. By that, I mean that blogs in general live and die by the link - or more accurately, the absence of one. And one way that we do stand apart from the traditional media, and can provide an even greater service to our audience, is to freely acknowledge without hesitation, jealousy or ego, more of the genuinely talented individual commentators that toil in relative obscurity throughout our electronic universe.
As is true in the "real" world, our level of credibility relies heavily on the references we receive, and the Big Guns (who have ample support staffs) should devote more energy to finding those "diamonds in the rough" and directing traffic to their sites. It's no secret to many of us that some of the most incisive writing out there is being done by passionate, erudite bloggers whose sites, unfortunately, are averaging five hits per day.
Furthermore, it's a win-win situation, for all involved. A large number of small, independent news-and-opinion blogs frequently unearth key information and provide unique perspectives missing from the essays of their bigger on-line cousins. The more exposure these viewpoints are given, the wider and more textured the national discussion becomes - and the more credit will be given to the "A-list" sites for the depth of their investigative reporting.
The established blogs need to make it their responsibility to find and reference those vibrant and essential "little fish." In doing so, they would more faithfully reflect the democratized nature of the blogosphere. And it only makes sense that by recognizing the significant contributions of the "little people," the general populace - in greater numbers than ever - will develop an increased affinity for, and reliance on, informational blogs as their source of news, opinion, and entertainment.
Overview
We need to fundamentally alter our approach. Blogs started as an alternative to traditional media. But if we're to become the mainstream and relegate traditional media to the alternative, we're going to have to think like the audience and become more considerate of our readers. We need to seduce them and serve them. We need to understand them and reflect them.
We may be less obviously arrogant than newspapers used to be, but the way we treat our readers mirrors the way they served their customers. We should be facilitating their visits to our sites instead of insisting they blindly follow our lead. We should be empowering them instead of making all their choices for them.
It's a big leap in thinking, but a small step in execution. Still, our success and our continued vitality depends on bridging the difference.
- - - - -
(We'd like to know what you, our readers, have to say. Please leave comments below, or at The Enigmatic Paradox. Thanks for your thoughts.)
- - - - -
It is one of the great ironies of life that we so often become our parents. More often than we care to admit, our teenage rebellion comes to naught. We mellow with time and end up repeating the past.
The truism is borne out in considering the state of the blogging art, especially those focused on politics and current events. We've created our "generation's identity" with rebellious criticism of traditional media - yet make many of the same mistakes that humbled our predecessors.
As newspapers once did, we make readers work much too hard to find the information they want. While worshipping at the altar of reader participation and accountability, we are much less user friendly than many newspapers. We don't trust readers' judgments and give them few choices. We're singularly linear in our thinking and layout even though the medium rewards multiplicity.
Many news-and-opinion blogs seem like doses of cod liver oil - they may be "healthy" but they're difficult to swallow. Like newspapers of old, these sites make little effort to seduce readers. They provide many opportunities to comment but expect visitors to follow the laid-out trail of "bread crumbs" like so many chickens. Most blogs' underlying assumption amounts to "love it or leave it."
And we should be responsive to the frustrations of those who choose the latter.
It's certainly presumptuous for someone like me, a babe in the blogging woods, to criticize blogs. But the medium has reached a critical impasse as some blogs, which boast larger readerships than most newspapers, seek national recognition and the accompanying impact. That goal, however, will continue to elude the industry until we recognize our self-imposed limitations and overcome them.
Miracle Grow
It takes so much time, effort and work to blog that, like traditional reporters, it's all too easy to become convinced that the world revolves around our work. We read each others' blogs, we comment on each others' blogs and we talk to other bloggers. It's an insular and all-consuming routine, given that blogging has sprouted as if it's been raised on a steady diet of Miracle Grow.
But we should recognize that we're still the freaks, a tiny minority. We're preaching to the choir. The vast majority of Americans, even the vast majority of computer users, see us as subversive, at best, and perhaps even dangerous.
In large part, especially for serious, informational sites, this is the price we pay for the company we keep. The absence of standards and regulations is the birthright of the blogosphere. It is the quintessential village square, the ultimate soapbox for the brilliant, the perceptive and the imaginative. But it also is a platform for every quack, conspiracist and narcissist with a computer, a cause, and a fondness for exhibitionism.
So the medium's great advantage is also its Achilles' heel, especially in a country whose national pastime is the assignation of guilt by association. This virtually guarantees that the valuable will always remain overshadowed by the fluff, the absurd, and the idiotic. It's just the statistical reality of the game - and an annoying handicap.
If news-and-opinion blogs are going to rise to the next level and become something more than niche players, if blogs want to spread their message beyond the self-selecting congregation, if blogs are going to become trusted sources of general information for the general public, then we're going to have to change our thinking and examine our assumptions.
Instead of telling readers what they should know, we have to start asking what readers want to know and how we can give it to them. Instead of taking our identity through criticism - however irrefragable and no matter how well deserved - we have to acknowledge and discuss our weaknesses.
History may be on our side. Technology may be giving us a boost. But to count, we must mature. We're going to have to do more and do it better.
So in the spirit of Jeff Jarvis' essays at Buzz Machine on how newspapers can adapt to the emerging electronic world, I offer what I hope is the opening salvo in an ongoing conversation. My guiding principle in this discussion might be taken from the scene in Catch-22 when the pilot frantically tries to save the crew of his battered bomber.
"Help him! Help him," the pilot orders.
"Help whom?" the sole surviving crewmembers answers.
"Help him!" the pilot orders. "Help the bombardier!"
"I am the bombardier," the bombardier replies.
"Well, help him," the pilot says in exasperation.
All Work, No Play
We too often take readers for granted. Of all the major media, we're among the least user friendly. The underlying assumption in both our writing and our layout is that anyone arriving at our sites is our captive and should follow the lines we draw in the electronic sand. Of course, we want to influence. That is, after all, the very reason most bloggers started blogging in the first place - and giving our audience too many "outs" too soon risks the early loss of an increasingly attention-deficient public.
But if we treat our readers solely as our captives, we'll only lose them. We have to learn to trust them. We need to help them navigate to what interests them. And we need to make our blogs visually appealing. Currently, we simply post "reams" of words and expect readers to slog through them. This hubris may be acceptable for established blogs whose loyal readers accept the authors' apathy towards site design. But it severely restricts their appeal, and is fatal for lesser-known pundits with equally vital things to say.
Nor do we tailor our sites to readers' varying commitment. We seem to assume that every reader is as interested in each post as every other reader. But some topics interest me more than others. I skip some subjects. I want to read only a few graphs about others. I haven't found a blog yet that has a button that allows me to skip to the next post.
More often than not, I'll start a long post, read a little and then decide to move on. But the scroll usually moves so fast that I'm lost before I know it. I find myself asking, "Did I miss the start of a new post or is this part of the post I had decided to skip?" It's usually easier to move on to another blog than to try and locate myself.
And, as newspapers discovered some years ago, that's a form of slow motion suicide.
The inverted pyramid isn't a tool of "evil-doers" and it won't kill us to use it from time to time. OK, we're not the AP. But must we all imitate frustrated New Yorker writers all the time? Too often we bury the lead. Too often, we cast aside discipline and think that long is obviously better. The technology of blogging is particularly well suited to "capsulization" - a graph or two, a la Wall Street Journal, with the main points linked to a longer explanation.
Yet we rarely provide this service. And while original source material may be mothers' milk, do I need the entire, self-serving press statement issued by anyone even vaguely associated with the story. We should summarize and link more often. I know it takes time. But the readers' time is far more precious.
Focus & Choice
Newspapers have many stories on the front page for a reason: not everyone is interested in the same thing. We should use frames to organize our blogs so that readers have an easier time locating stories that they think are important. We should consider separating ongoing major stories in one area of the screen or another to make them easier to follow.
Major newspapers, for instance, now create sections in which they group similar articles about ongoing issues. But we mix stories about Brokeback Mountain with Bush administration spying as if they always speak to the same audience.
The exception that proves this rule is The Huffington Post. It's a pioneer in using its space to serve competing interests. But, unfortunately, it's adopted the tabloid penchant for attention grabbing "wood headlines" rather than the more serious broadsheet layout. Still, it deserves praise for using visuals and experimenting with a layout that permits readers to make their own choices.
But there's no reason not to take the basic idea further. I can envision blogs being divided into sections for different subjects and different types of stories. Like USA Today, they might be color-coded. Regardless of the specific design and execution, the basic thrust is to expand readers' choices and to provide a natural framework of prioritizing stories.
Joshua Marshall deserves a great deal of credit for beginning to brand Talking Points Memo by starting related blogs with different foci and different styles. But why separate them? Instead of countless promotions, Talking Points could run the other blogs in a window.
It's a way for a single blog to serve multiple audiences. That's what The New York Times did with its sections. And it saved the newspaper that was well on its way to the ash heap of history. It's certainly more technically complex. But it shouldn't be beyond the means of the larger, better-staffed operations.
If we want to extend our reach and grow our credibility, we need to proselytize and convert. We need to seduce visitors into giving us a commitment. Otherwise, we're limiting our audience to those who already believe. And that's going to truncate our success.
Not All Posts Are Created Equal
Newspapers learned long ago that a lot of their communication has nothing to do with words. A glance at any newspaper immediately gives the reader a great deal of information. But we've ignored this type of education. We don't provide any obvious guides to distinguish between the important and the amusing, the spectacular and the vital.
We exist in an environment that is incredibly competitive and gets ever more so. But we don't make much effort to be help to our readers use their time wisely. We don't provide guidance. We expect readers to take the time to figure out the merits of each post.
It's wonderful if they do. But, to a large extent, it's our job to do it for them. And why aren't we serving readers who are looking for one-peek guides - or, as they used to say in the movies, "Just the headlines, Ma'am" - by providing headlines that give some insight as to the content of their respective posts?
Template Redesign
A quality blog quickly becomes the whale that swallowed Jonah. I realize that most blogs are one-person labors of love. It's a Sisyphean task to gather all the information needed every day, organize it, analyze it and write about it - not to mention somehow earn a living. And now I'm claiming that's not enough. There's nothing I can say except please don't kill the messenger.
A good blog is performance art. It changes every day, evolves and grows. Few of us have the technical skills to do much more than massage the basic template by adding a frill or two. Take this site, for example. While I've gamely attempted to solve some of the aforementioned problems with rudimentary tinkering, I know there's much more that could - and should - be done.
But we're the victims of pre-ordained limitations in template design. Even those of us with a strong desire to increase user friendliness and reader choices have few options. We have to use Rube Goldberg-ian jump buttons and primitive html tags that often make site navigation resemble a game of Pong on speed.
That convinces me there's a lucrative market for news-specific templates with easy-to-follow directions. Are any entrepreneurial web designers interested? You have a guaranteed customer right here. Or perhaps, a volunteer may be willing to create and distribute some open source software?
Sometimes It Is Who You Know
In the blogosphere food-chain, being swallowed by the bigger fish isn't necessarily a negative. By that, I mean that blogs in general live and die by the link - or more accurately, the absence of one. And one way that we do stand apart from the traditional media, and can provide an even greater service to our audience, is to freely acknowledge without hesitation, jealousy or ego, more of the genuinely talented individual commentators that toil in relative obscurity throughout our electronic universe.
As is true in the "real" world, our level of credibility relies heavily on the references we receive, and the Big Guns (who have ample support staffs) should devote more energy to finding those "diamonds in the rough" and directing traffic to their sites. It's no secret to many of us that some of the most incisive writing out there is being done by passionate, erudite bloggers whose sites, unfortunately, are averaging five hits per day.
Furthermore, it's a win-win situation, for all involved. A large number of small, independent news-and-opinion blogs frequently unearth key information and provide unique perspectives missing from the essays of their bigger on-line cousins. The more exposure these viewpoints are given, the wider and more textured the national discussion becomes - and the more credit will be given to the "A-list" sites for the depth of their investigative reporting.
The established blogs need to make it their responsibility to find and reference those vibrant and essential "little fish." In doing so, they would more faithfully reflect the democratized nature of the blogosphere. And it only makes sense that by recognizing the significant contributions of the "little people," the general populace - in greater numbers than ever - will develop an increased affinity for, and reliance on, informational blogs as their source of news, opinion, and entertainment.
Overview
We need to fundamentally alter our approach. Blogs started as an alternative to traditional media. But if we're to become the mainstream and relegate traditional media to the alternative, we're going to have to think like the audience and become more considerate of our readers. We need to seduce them and serve them. We need to understand them and reflect them.
We may be less obviously arrogant than newspapers used to be, but the way we treat our readers mirrors the way they served their customers. We should be facilitating their visits to our sites instead of insisting they blindly follow our lead. We should be empowering them instead of making all their choices for them.
It's a big leap in thinking, but a small step in execution. Still, our success and our continued vitality depends on bridging the difference.
- - - - -
(We'd like to know what you, our readers, have to say. Please leave comments below, or at The Enigmatic Paradox. Thanks for your thoughts.)
posted by Bob P @ 3:10 PM
3 Comments:
Well, I see some of your points, but....
In essence what you describe is what I would consider to be a hijacking of the blogsphere by those who want it to be something it isn't. You complain about the state of blogs from a navigational and journalistic standpoint as well as the necessity for blogs to be a compilation, repository and directional aid.
And yet... it may very well be that your vision is what is not true to blogging, instead of the reverse.
The art of blogging, to which you refer, is the art of writing, philosophising, composing, and presenting ideas. That should not be confused with the act of information conglomeration.
The vision you present of "blogging", as well as the software to support it (which you claim doesn't exist) is, in my opinion, the definition of an information portal, not a blog. Blogging can be an integral part of a portal, just as news aggregation and topical navigation are part of a portal.
I doubt many bloggers have any intentions of becoming the next New York Times - or the next Google - but so what.
They key is to get them linked to from a topical portal - not to make them a portal - and allow them to continue the art of composition. And then, not criticize them for not being a portal, when they are in fact, true to the definition of blogging.
I think your definition is simply applied to the wrong outlet.
Interesting points, n.j.., and I'm glad to see that you apparently echo my thoughts about the importance of links from bigger fish.
While I understand your description of the inherent differences between blogs and portals (and thanks for the implication that portal templates do exist), I think that, for many of us who believe that informed, critical thought is a vital key to addressing the ills of our current era, we'd simply like to become more efficient, useful resource centers for our readers.
Without, of course, giving up the essential editorial nature that you accurately point out is at the heart of the blogging world. Call it a combination of "art" and "act", instead of an either/or alliance.
No, we don't want to be the AP, or to compete with the Times Online. But news-and-opinion blogs have the incredible potential to become primary information sources for local communities, whose only other options may be FOX News and a regional newspaper guilty of parroting misleading government talking points.
So if basic design limitations are hindering that potential, and pushing readers away, the loss to the overall education of the public is something that has real consequences - as we've seen with this specific Administration. And maybe, just maybe, we could do better.
Thanks again for your response. And if you have links to portal templates that you believe might be of interest, I'd be grateful for those addresses.
--BP
Bob, this is the best essay I've ever read on the subject. I just wish that I had read it when I first started.
I agree with n.j. that what you're describing is a portal, and not a blog. But what the world needs is not more blogs, it needs more people engaging in the political process. We need to make Moveon.org type portals for our own communities. This is the whole reason I came up with The American Peoples Congress, with the concept that ordinary citizens can come together both in person and on the computer and make things happen in real time. A blog, by the vary nature of it being all in a line, is totally ill-suited to that function. For that reason, those of us who like the idea of what you're talking about need to put together tools and hacks and software that we can help new people put together so they can have a portal for their community. This is the holy grail for progressive politics, democracy in action. I would love it if the model I created takes off, but even if every single community has its own (or five thousand) different portal/s, we would be making a huge difference.
The one reason I think Bob gets the edge on this one is because most net neophytes come to a site and they want to be entertained, they want to be encouraged, they want to be inspired, and they certainly don't want to be led by the nose to a bunch of topics they aren't interested in.
Check out my blog - I figured out how to shorten posts using blogger's help service. This is a big time-saver for visitors to the site, and also I figured out how to set up categories. I can't remember who gave me the tip but I found it through blogger search.
It'ss my belief that if every city has its own local version of moveon.org or democracyforamerica.com, it will be much easier for people who are just becoming aware to get involved via baby steps. First they begin by writing letters to congressmen, then they write letters to the editor, then they march in a protest march, then they start their own blog, and on it goes. This is the future of our democracy, and as long as those of us who respect the rights of individuals to create their own media, this will be the way the future goes.
It is imperative that anyone who cares about independent voices contacts the FCC and their legislators and goes to town hall meetings and speaks out on the importance of keeping the internet free and relatively unrestricted. I have no problem with regulating pornography or spam, just don't regulate the free speech baby out with the bathwater.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home