The blogger and the newsman can be friends

If a newspaper does not have a Web site, does it make a sound?

New Jersey Jewish News tested that koan over the past few months, after we took down our Web site in anticipation of a redesign. In that time, it was easy to think we had fallen off the map. Far-flung correspondents and curious out-of-towners often asked if we were on line and gasped when we said no. Regular subscribers berated us because we couldn’t provide a link to a particular story that they could e-mail to friends. When our revamped site went back on line last week (www.njjewishnews.com), I announced to our staff that we had taken a giant leap into the 20th century.

One of the most frustrating aspects of our disappearance from cyberspace was our complete inability to participate in the “blogosphere.” To which many of you will no doubt ask, the what? I’ll explain. According to the White House, of all places, a blog (short for Web log) is a “free-flowing on-line journal that’s constantly updated with the latest news from throughout the Web.” Blogging is an individualist’s sport, in which anyone with a Web page can draw your attention to an article appearing elsewhere on the Internet and provide his or her own commentary. A number of professional journalists maintain daily blogs (Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, and Eric Alterman among them) although the great promise of blogging, according to many, is that it allows media amateurs, in the best sense, to comment on and deconstruct the news of the moment. As Kaus put it earlier this year in his blog (which I read about in the blog of Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub), “The clash of all those insta-takes gets to the truth in about a thousandth of the time it takes a [David] Broder to pronounce judgment.”

Reading the best blogs is like sharing a booth at a diner with a caffeinated polymath who has just read five morning newspapers and tells you what’s wrong with all of them. I also think of the classic Jewish collection called the Mikraot G’dolot, which reproduces the text of the Torah along with often contrary interpretations by a range of medieval commentators.

As the editor of a weekly newspaper, reading blogs can also feel like reading my own obituary. Blogs can be updated as fast as the news is reported; a newspaper starts aging from the moment it is sent to the printer. Bloggers can erase a mistake with a click of a mouse; our errors sit around like unwrapped egg salad, stinking until we can clean up the mess a week later.

One of my favorite Jewish blogs, the cheekily named “Protocols” (http://protocols.blogspot.com), recently made the case for blogs over Jewish weeklies. “J-blogs, from which one can get just about all the most Jewish-relevant news and opinion out there in roughly 10-15 minutes a day, while encouraging interaction via comments and post updates, have the real potential to surpass the weeklies in terms of value to the reader,” writes Steven Weiss, one of the keen-eyed and tireless Yeshiva University students and alumni who contribute to “Protocols.” Adds Weiss, “The only thing that will allow Jewish weeklies to survive in print much longer is the fact that Orthodox and many Conservative Jews won’t use a computer on Shabbos — but that paradigm can only survive so long as Jews are still willing to get their news as much as 1 1/2 weeks late in a paper that leaves ink from poorly-crafted articles on their fingers.”

Well, maybe. I still think there are things newspapers can do that blogs can’t. A newspaper is more than a series of arguments that scroll down a computer screen. It’s news, and opinion, and wedding announcements, and calendars, and photos, and coupons, and advertisements, and public service features. (Blogs boast they can offer all of these things, but just try cutting out a Web page and sticking it on your fridge.) Bloggers crow about the unmediated, unedited nature of their posts, but we mediators and editors think we are doing readers a service by culling the real from the make-believe, fact from rumor. We ink-stained wretches at NJJN were the first to report that a national pro-Palestinian conference at Rutgers University had been relocated to Ohio State; weeks later “Protocols” was still urging readers to come to New Brunswick and protest the event.

Finally, blogs wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the journalists actually reporting the news that bloggers comment on. Yes, some bloggers do legwork. But journos are much more likely to be out there, making the phone calls, knocking on doors, sitting through city council meetings. In this regard, blogs often strike me as somewhat parasitic, attaching themselves to the bellies of the mainstream media outlets as they paddle along the sea of information like a murky metaphor.

That being said, blogs serve a number of vital functions. Bloggers cast a wide net and bring home news and articles that even I, an inveterate Web surfer, would otherwise miss. I make regular stops at, among others, Protocols, Nextbook.com, Instapundit.com, Romanesko, and YudelLine, and this newspaper is all the richer for it. Most important, by critiquing the mainstream media, blogs force them to own up to their mistakes, assumptions, and distortions. Which is why one of the first e-mails I sent announcing our new site went to Weiss, in hopes that he’ll become a regular reader and put us through the wringer.