On Frozen Blog

He picks up scraps of information
He’s adept at adaptation
Because for strangers and arrangers
Constant change is here to stay

He’s got a force field and a flexible plan
He’s got a date with fate in a black sedan
He plays fast forward for as long as he can
But he won’t need a bed
He’s a digital man

–”Digital Man,” Neil Peart

Bloggers’ row for Wednesday night’s game against San Jose included my good friend Eric from Off Wing Opinion and two new ones, Rebecca (aka Caps Chick) of A View from the Cheap Seats, and Rob of Random Reality Thoughts. Rebecca is a graduate of world-famous McGill University in Montreal. This made me nearly insanely jealous; I briefly asked her about the prevalence of hockey on campus and then assigned her the impossible fantasy honor of skating from class to class over the course of her four years there.

I was immersed in a quasi-crowded press box with these distinguished bloggers and print and broadcast press, and an ongoing discussion among us New-Age media folk was the pace and surety of change that Bloggerdom was leading. Rob was especially animated by and assured of this revolution.

“They (the Old media) still don’t get it,” he told me. “They’re merely adding layers of copy and paying lip service to the heart of the revolution.” I knew exactly what he meant. While there’s a vital common ground between the Old and New media with say professional standards of journalism — judicious fact-checking; getting quoted reflections accurately conveyed; exercising discerning news value judgments — that common ground swiftly disappears in vapor trails as the digital age demolishes conventional notions of beat coverage.

Principally with its edgy electronics and its passion prose.

Where Old Media has Dragnet’s Jack Webb seeking “Just the facts, ma’am,” the New is dealing in DNA evidence.

Rob then informed me of a startling bit of data: the planet apparently has 57 million registered bloggers. He asked me how many of them I thought had formal journalism training.

“At least 45 million would be without, I’d guess,” I replied. Interesting, though, that when I took a quick survey among us, three of the four had B.A.s in journalism and or real pro journalism experience in our pre-blogging careers. The unsupervised and untrained in their basements and in their pajamas with laptops libel didn’t quite apply in Blogger’s row this night.

The elder statesmen of Blogger’s row Wednesday, Eric and I chuckled at our Paleozic Era-like era of copy layout labor with “rulers and wax.”

Earlier, down in the press lounge, the four of us were lucky enough to share a dining table with an extremely hockey knowledgeable reporter from Sports Illustrated. He regaled us with his insider’s knowledge of some of the game’s leading personalities, but then he began a grilling of Eric and the Off Wing Opinion enterprise, and I was struck by the basic nature of his inquiries. SI of course has SI.com, which includes sports blogging, and the two entities share reporter staffing and copy. SI is Old Media, and this was an Old Media reporter, and even with the New brought inside the Old, and lodged there for some years, the culture of the change was still somewhat alien to him. As I thought about this I saw a parallel with the Washington Post’s recent efforts at playing blogging catch-up.

I wondered: can a reporter today be both Old and New? I thought: perhaps, eventually, but not instantaneously. The dictates of the Old are so restrictive, so conformist, and we see this especially with Caps’ coverage. What was the last print file you read from any established outlet in town that bore language, analysis, and perspective such as to merit your clipping it for future reference? Instead, almost always we get pedestrian prose fueled by pedestrian vantage. And yet when I visit Japers’ Rink I regularly copy a JP passage that’s both edified and made me howl and pasted it into email to friends.

Another interesting question: when an Old media reporter attends a morning skate and keys in his observations is he ipso facto blogging? Maybe yes, maybe no. The answer, I think, lies in the freedom or latitude of reflection his editors afford him. Wait — if he’s there by decree of editors, can he truly be a blogger? Wait — if that copy’s edited, by Old media editors, can it truly be blog copy? Wait — is blog text “copy”? Now I think we’re getting closer to the heart of Rob’s protest in press row Wednesday night: they don’t quite get it.

The revolution Rob and e-others talk about has less to do, I think, with digitization and real-time chronicling and perhaps more with a proletarian rise against Old World Elites. Bloggers as Bolsheviks. Technology is its vehicle.

Eric shared with me snippets of conversations he’s had all season long with the print beat reporters, about how much pressure they have reported being under to generate volumes of files in the course of a single day and week. Some big papers now commonly ask that the beat guys file not only game stories but blog accounts from, say, morning skates; “notes” files; radio reports; television reports; and the odd feature piece. What apparently they’re not required to do is catch sleep.

It’s a terrible duty-load, I think, for these well-meaning and well trained men and women pros to try and carry off. They’re in the throes of a landscape-altering funnel cloud, and their editors are expecting them to retain starched shirts.