My turn

I thought I'd conclude my contributions to this blog with a few thoughts about the future of blogging. A little meta-blogging, if you will.

The blogosphere (I hate that word, but it's the one we have) is in trouble, but doesn't realize it yet. Newspapers all over the country are failing; even the venerable New York Times is in trouble, and recently started selling front-page advertising to try to boost its revenue. Some bloggers would be only too happy to dance on the grave of the "old media" empire, but that would be shortsighted. Blogging is essentially a parasitic activity. Bloggers do almost no journalism of their own; rather they distill, interpret, and comment on journalistic work done by papers and wire services. If the newspapers die, the blogosphere starves. Yet the Internet revolution that the bloggers helped create is exactly what's killing off newspapers.

I'm not sure how we solve this problem. Good journalism costs money, and putting news and commentary on the Internet is not very profitable — online ad revenues are minuscule, and Internet users as a group don't like to pay subscription fees. A new model needs to emerge, but with newspapers quickly dying, we're running out of time.

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Thanks for listening; you've been a wonderful audience. Feel free to check out my LiveJournal and my personal website. The content there is more technical than political, however. If you miss your regular doses of political snark, I highly recommend You Are Dumb and DBMT, both of which are far funnier than anything I've ever been able to write.