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January 31, 2005:

For more than a half decade since I stumbled onto his work, Californian Steve Krutzler has been a good friend. I've never corresponded with him nor purchased anything from him nor met him. Indeed, I don't think Steve knows me, but Steve Krutzler, through his blog, has kept me connected to an admittedly quirky community, and I appreciate it. More or less weekly, I've consulted Krutzler's blog that for nearly nine years has daily provided updates, classified advertising, web hosting and conversations for those interested in Gene Roddenberry's remarkably durable science fiction franchise, Star Trek. At Krutzler's Trekweb.com, we in the community browse, bicker and boldly go.

Krutzler, ever fair-minded, has daily posted the latest news about anything related to the The Final Frontier - I think he even kept it up on his honeymoon. In his daily “Triblets” of information, trekkers can find the latest production notes and reviews of episodes of Star Trek Enterprise, which those of us in the community simply call ENT. And, not only that, he has provided details into the latest acting projects of Robert Duncan McNeill or the baby born to 78-year-old James Doohan, Scotty. Lately, I am sad to report, Krutzler has been reporting on the recurring, national comments made by Viacom chief Leslie Moonves that indicate that the fifth Star Trek show, ENT, will, in all likelihood, be canceled after this season. Star Trek, of course, will live on, if not prosper. Others in this community will post scripts online, make their own episodes, or write books. I expect Steve will keep me informed and I'll be grateful.

It's good to be here today. Since Gary asked me to speak on blogging, I've been thinking a lot about blogging in light of my long relationship with Steve Krutzler. What does Trekweb teach about this phenomonon? What does this, perhaps, benign hobby of mine teach about more important topics like political communication in our republic, like the challenges of human communication in a loud world, and like our role as audiences and consumers of a media product.

My purpose, ultimately, today is to emphasize two straightforward but oft-neglected points: First, that in all the excitement surrounding new technology and new media, the message, not the medium, is the message - what we say matters. Second, more than ever before our role as an honorable audience matters too. What we choose to view matters. And in this environment of significant choice, our choices can grow warm niches that seemed insignificant only a few years ago.

Now, I am not arguing that technology or diversity can be some savior for our troubled world in themselves. We should be wary of such false voices. What I am saying is that this post-9/11 world demands our best, that we raise our voices, and one way we do so is selecting the best content. If you spend time perusing pornographic blogs or downloading the blogs of jihadists, there will be more jihadists and pornographers and the world will suffer. If you take the time to understand complex or obscure issues, to support Web sites and bloggers of integrity, there is good there, even when you don't blog yourself.

First, then, Trekweb teaches that blogging really isn't a new thing. For more than a decade, people have been making comments, important and otherwise, about myriad topics and posting them to Web sites on the Internet. Indeed, such blogging is an outgrowth of one of the oldest human desires: to get the news.

Historian and sociologist Mitchell Stephens has argued in his Book “A History of News,” that the need to have information “seems basic to being human.” He recounts stories of communities cut off from news or news media and how emotionally challenging such was. Many in this room spent a couple of years doing missionary work without regular access to news media … the need to know was striking for me as we'd weary with our teasing each new person to Japan about the latest in movies and sports from the states. Ranchers in Wyoming have reported about having “a starvation for print,” Stephens writes. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal reported how frustrated young Chinese citizens were when they were unable to access information overseas about the death of Zhao Ziyang and the efforts many went to found out about this patron of Chinese democracy. In essence, blogs are just a recent illustration of this human need to get - and perhaps convey - news.

What seems new in the blogging arena is both the growing ease of the technology to blog and the number who do so as a result of that ease. Krutzler and his ilk, often built Web sites or paid for space on a Web server. They were the early adopters. But now, Web sites like Google's blogger.com and others make it as easy as an e-mail to maintain a more-or-less free space as a blogger and to participate in a community of people with a variety of views. Leading blogger Andrew Sullivan argues that powerful political Web logs have become the domain of independent people not just those in the MSM - mainstream media - only in recent years. For me as a media educator, the blogging movement has become the way we teach about writing for the Web. Texts are now including chapters on writing for the Web, including blogging, the way they have long included chapters on the Inverted Pyramid style that wire services use. Alas, one big change is that blogging has now gone institutional and mainstream. Best estimates, Hugh Hewitt and the WSJ write, are that as many as 8 million American have a blog. That number may double within a couple of years.

It will be interesting to watch as this goes forward. When are bloggers journalists, entitled to especial deference, if not always by law, then by custom? A First Amendment case is beginning that pits a 19-year-old fan of Apple Corporation against Apple itself because his Thinksecret.com Web site allegedly revealed important details of apples forthcoming products before Apple could announce them. As a journalist, he would usually be entitled to protection by receiving the information in lawful means. But here? Given the more anonymous nature of internet writing, should it be expected that bloggers disclose financial incentives behind their writings, as certain bloggers received money from Howard Dean's campaign? Most journalistic codes would fire a person who did not disclose such conflicts? Where are the ethical lines?

Second, What Trekweb also makes clear as well is there still is great power and an unspoken relationship between small outlets, such as blogs, and the offerings of major media. It is, alas, Star Trek that Krutzler writes of, not of smaller minutae -- things of interest to him. Star Trek is a billion-dollar industry. The CBS News controversy was kept alive with those with large microphones on talk radio or in major newspapers. Trent Lott's story grew only when the major media got involved. The Swift Boats' most effective means was getting the MSM involved, not just by blogging. One blogger, 21-year-old Jordan Golson, according to the Journal, overnight became a very important blogger because he had posted videos of the recent Asian tsunami … something only first talked about by the larger press - as many as 640,000 people were looking at his site. I have regularly read James Taranto's best of the Web Today - but because he is featured by one of the Wall Street Journal's Web sites. Even instapundit is popular to some degree because it links to interesting articles that others write for MSM. Indeed the best criticism I know of the rise of Rush Limbaugh - to whom I listen a couple of times a week when I can - and of Matt Drudge is that they rely not on original reporting themselves and the honesty of their own research. Instead, they relies on articles in the Mainstream Media for much of his stack of stuff! Indeed, just this morning, opinonjournal.com reports that Limbaugh's recent concern over immigration policy came from an article he read. Or, Limbaugh gets his opinions from smart political analysts at think tanks or within the ranks of the Republican Party. In an odd way, the way we do blogging now together with these new media means that we have more people talking from more perspectives, but about fewer and fewer things.

And there is another irony to note. The idea of blogging is that it democratizes communication, making it more possible for anyone to have a voice. True and positive enough, but only as far as it goes. Access to the Internet, though wide spread in the United States, is much less widespread in the underdeveloped world. So the poorest among us, as always, are still the most voiceless. Ted Koppel reported in 2002 that in the Congo, millions of people have died in a civil war - up to five times what we have died in our own civil war … nevertheless, it is rarely heard of here. Ironically, at one economic heart of this fight is control of the mineral tantalum, which is vital for the electronic capacitors we use in cell phones to make phone calls, in playstations to play games, in palm pilots to keep track of appointments and in computers to write blogs. One reason why we hear so little from Africa is there are so few ways to get that information because people have no money to tell their stories. There aren't many bloggers writing from the squalid refugee camps near Goma.

Third, Krutzler's experience does teach us a lot about customer service. I go back to Krutzler's web site because he is credible, honest and accurate. I enjoy his dispassionate voice and enjoy learning the latest. I am part - albeit somewhat obliquely - of a community of people.

Krutzler once regularly posted - copies, as I recall - of online chats by producer Ronald D. Moore. Moore, unlike other producers, would debate and discuss plot twists with fans, defend his stories, and even discuss the history of warfare in his efforts to maintain support for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Moore's use of the net, though not really a blog, per se, was clearly deeply time-consuming, but he did it because it helped differentiate him and his product. Clearly, to those of us in Trekdom, Moore's work speaks for itself. He writes well. In short, he can deliver the goods and didn't really need to talk to fans. But respect and loyalty pays, especially in this universe of the techie fans of Star Trek - it is no surprise that after he left the Federation, he had a loyal, devoted, willing following for his next big project, a remake of the old '70s TV show, Battlestar Galactica.

Meanwhile, some other talented Trek producers - and their product - have somehow grown stale and unappreciated. My guess is that most Star Trek fans are more excited about the new Commander Adama than by the shiny exploits of Captain Archer … Moore writes well, but his use of the internet to respect his core fans did much in building this new product. I learned of this product because of Krutzler. You can do the same thing for your smaller group of customers - answer intelligent complaints, chat online where appropriate, share a love of common things - link them to things that help them, even create a friendly personality for yourself on a Website or blog. It's all part of good public relations. Part of Moore's success is that in this age of diverse media, he seems to understand that he is a product, not just his excellent writing, which, by itself, almost, but not quite, speaks for itself.

In the late 1960s, media guru Marshall McLuhan suggested that the medium is the message. To me, that phrase means that the medium you pick determines who it reaches and how you say the message. While this is all true, let us never forget that, at the end of the day, it is the message that is the message. And in a world of turmoil, it is the stubborn quality of fact that still matters. Skeptical verification, honest inquiry and clear thinking - and fresh facts. They all matter in this world, as much today as anytime.

In the Rathergate scandal, the factual expertise of a blogger on typewriters made all the difference, not just the numbers of people who argued for the ouster of Dan Rather. In the Trent Lott scandal, it was the stubborn fact of the actual platforms of the Dixiecrats and Sen. Thurmond that sunk him, not just that Andrew Sullivan wrote. It was the factual basis to the arguments of the Swift Boat veterans that did the most damage, not just that a lot of people saw them.

The American Journalism Review notes that many of the major cabinet agencies have no full-time reporters covering them anymore - none, not even the Washington Post. It has also observed that fewer newspapers employ full-time statehouse reporters as a cost-saving device. And if it is bad at newspapers, it is, of course, worse at radio and TV stations. Much of what you hear on the radio comes from the AP. And the AP gets its stories, mostly, from newspapers.

It is easy to be frustrated by poor coverage of issues, but I believe that poor coverage is better than none. Each week, numerous fascinating hearing on Capitol Hill get ignored and many bills in many states never get mentioned in any newspaper at all. Indeed, one study of the EPA, a relatively well-covered agency, found that only 33 percent of its issues ever made it into the mainstream press. There are many stubborn facts waiting to be unearthed, but most are neglected and the silence is rarely good for anyone. Try to find bloggers that believe in the sheer discipline of fact and the importance of politics in our great republic. (As an aside, I am a proud Idahoan here. For its relatively small size, Idaho is comparatively well-served by a variety of dedicated state house reporters. It is also is as transparent as any state in the process of legislation.) Another good blog or two would help - especially when it writes of things no else is telling us about. Honest, clear, accurate facts still matter most in the debate.

When Idahoan Philo Farnsworth envisioned another revolutionary medium with television, he hoped for a building of community through TV as an educational medium. What he found, instead was inanity. Only as he watched the moon landing did he think his effort was worthwhile. So it has always been. The words of Martin Luther King can be more powerful through television just as the images of Leni Riefenstahl and Nazi rallies in Nuremburg can. Committing ourselves to truthful reporting and to honest persuasion is as important, if not more important, than ever. The message, not the medium, is still the message.

Lastly, a word about our role as an audience. When we think of audience, we tend to think of the modern concept of people, almost robots, who consume media thrown at us by large, even uncaring, corporations. But the older conception of audience is much broader. Among the earliest use of the word audience was by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales where one of the pilgrims confesses his weaknesses in the audience of the Pilgrim community. Later usages included the notion of a king or administrator giving audience. Indeed, some uses where synonyms for terms like state or nation. So, audience is a gift we give and represents our responsibility to the greater community, not just as a consumer of messages and images and stories.
We have an obligation to our community as an audience to pick from those messages - those reporters and bloggers if you will -- that inform, that build and that have a ring of truth and that tell meaningful stories.

Oh, and I'm starting my own blog in the near future. So, we'll see you out there.

Thank you.


(Note: I have not included footnotes in this speech. If you wish to find out more, you can e-mail me. Also, the content of this speech is different from what I delivered.)