hail the mediocracy

With the end of the Blogging Journalism & Credibility conference, I'm reading through the posts, trying to digest it all. It's very interesting and has a lot of good lessons, it'll probably become part of my blogging bible along with Evangelical Outpost's How To Start a Blog Series

I do, however, disagree on one point, the characterization of the "wingers" as a problem. In this post, filed on the 22nd, Jon Garfunkel talks about his impressions of the first day. He comes up with a breakdown of the blogosphere into three groups.

We can speak as the blogs, bloggers, and the blogosphere as it had a stable definition. Except of course when these are criticized, people drop back into “blogs aren’t just one thing!”

So here’s how I break down the types of bloggers: Ringers, Stringers, and Wingers.

THE RINGERS
These are journalists who are now bloggers– apparently, the best authorities on this subject (cf. religious or party conversion) In addition, your authority on the subject of “Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility” is questioned if you do not blog, if you are not wholly transparent.

THE STRINGERS
People with local expertise in a given area, whether simply by living there, or having a vocation. These are the community of bloggers that everyone likes to talk about. It was suggested that local stringers could substitute for foreign correspondents. Rebecca McKinnon, with all due authority on the subject as a “ringer,” and having been a foreign correspondent, explained that the added value of FC’s is that they bring in the context for the home audience.

Also, the work of the Times’s Dexter Filkins in Iraq was explicitly saluted as stellar reporting.

THE WINGERS
I offered up the picture that a sizable portion of pundit-bloggers are simply “winging it"– on very little background information, context, reporting, etc. This is the most dangerous development in the blogosphere. No one has challenged this assertion yet.

Interesting concept, but it is naturally a very accreditation centered description, as one would expect from a group that is half journalists. I am certainly a winger; mediocre, uninformed, unaware of correct punctuation, no area of expertise, so I feel the need to answer Jon.

As I see it, the mediocre bloggers provide a valuable service -- authenticating the ideas provided my the experts. We get to do a gut check, as it were. Even with our a direct connection to the things being discussed by the stringers we can compare it to our meager experience. The collective statements of one thousand ordinary people saying their grocery prices are going up is at least as important as one well connected economist who can pull out an index. Probably more so, the index is a single statement, while the thousand have the raw data. Just because the economist has taken the time to draw conclusions from that data does not automatically give his view credibility. The vital assumption of the blogosphere, from the teenage girl's journal to a gardening group's blog to Andrew Sullivan's site, is that the collective thoughts of a great many people, each of which have a small piece of the puzzle, can be a greater aid than the formulas and presumptions of an elite.

Finally, the wingers allow the blogosphere to be much larger than would be possible if it were simply a community of experts. First, they absorb readers who would otherwise overwhelm the stringers and ringers and prevent the relatively close contact between writer and audience so important in the blogosphere. Second, wingers provide a bridge between the general public and the experts, putting the information in a context that is relevant to the public.

I really don't see what Garfunkel's problem is. If a blogger is irrelevant, a bad writer, or fails to research his subjects, he will not get the same kind of attention a more careful blogger will. Even if someone like this becomes successfull, it is not going to be the kind of attention Sullivan or Kos get. Besides, the audience such a person aquires will necessarily be limited, getting it's strength from partisanship, and so limited in the umber of people it can acquire.

It just looks to me like this is an incredibly elitist misunderstanding of the value of different parts of the blogosphere. Now, back to my mediocrity.