Jack Shafer has a column about the results of a poll released today by Pew about who blogs and why. The results are pretty unremarkable, I think. Basically, most people use blogs as hobbies and have no intention of trying to overthrow the traditional media.
Despite the small sample size, I'm going to take it as some confirmation for my view that the idea that bloggers are trying to replace journalists is mostly nonsense. I don't consider myself a blog evangelist or triumphalist, but I'd count myself as a blog enthusiast. What the poll reveals is that I'm in good company. There are high-profile exceptions -- Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen spring to mind -- but most bloggers have far more modest ambitions than replacing the media. (As Shafer notes, a lot of people just use blogging to communicate with friends and family or as a journal of sorts.) Glenn Reynolds thinks bloggers can replace journalists, but he's a fool, and as Christine Rosen nicely argued, his blog is the most powerful counterexample to his own thesis. If cutting and pasting excerpts from articles and then adding "Indeed" to the end count as journalism, and could actually threaten to replace journalism, then we're all screwed. (I'm sure I've done the "Indeed" thing plenty of times before, by the way. The difference is that I don't think it's journalism when I do it.)
What I do find quite entertaining are all the articles by people in the traditional media that claim there are large numbers of bloggers who think they can replace journalists but that it's not likely to happen. It's like they're creating their very own boogeyman to slap around. I hesitate to necessarily call it a straw man because I actually think most of them have convinced themselves that bloggers are actually trying to replace the media. It's all very, very strange, sort of confusing, but mostly just embarrassing for the people writing these stories.
One caveat: Eventually, I think, bloggers will replace op-ed columnists. But that'll be a good thing.
UPDATE: In the comments, Jay Rosen weighs in. And I do a mea culpa.
