Marc Ambinder was among the first traditional journalists to move completely online, writing a well-regarded political blog for The Hotline and then, more recently, The Atlantic.
Now Ambinder is returning to his roots in traditional, print journalism. He will be writing for the print editions of the National Journal and The Atlantic.
He is making the move, at least in part, because of misgivings about how journalism is practiced online.
“I Am a Blogger No Longer,” reads the headline on Ambinder’s final blog post for the Atlantic. Ambinder noted in the post that Chuck Todd, then the editor of The Hotline, hired him away from ABC News in 2005 to write exclusively for online.
“Back then, reporters didn’t blog,” Ambinder wrote. “Newspapers and magazines hired curators to update their websites, and reporters would occasionally post online, but there was a strict separation based on platform. You were considered legitimate only if your byline appeared in print. You were considered a blogger if you didn’t. And you didn’t want to be a blogger, because bloggers back then were second-class citizens in the country of journalism. Bloggers were partisan activists, yellers, provocateurs and upstarts.”
While Ambinder enjoyed the freedom to write what he wanted, the blog also meant getting stuck in a “relentless” and “punishing” loop of feedback between him and his readers.
“Unfortunately, the standard for defining oneself as a Web journalist depends on establishing a certain credibility with a particular audience of critics,” he wrote. “Responding to complaints about content and structure and bias is part of the way one establishes that credibility.”
Ambinder also felt compelled, even in straight news stories, to insert himself into the narrative.
“Really good journalism is ego-free,” he wrote. “By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective. What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening. Blogging is an ego-intensive process.”
Todd, who is now the chief White House correspondent and political director for NBC News, was intrigued by what his former employee had to say about practicing journalism online. But he’s not sure he agrees with all of Ambinder’s arguments.
Todd says journalists have a voice, whether they are writing a blog or longer, reported stories for the Atlantic. “With a blog, it’s your own voice,” he told me. “But people go to the Atlantic because they expect a certain sensibility.”
Todd believes the blog format is being overtaken by Twitter, but says journalists still must find ways to engage readers and viewers online. He makes it a point to respond to any criticism he gets online.
“We have a huge credibility gap in the media these days,” he said. “I joke that I’m trying to get people back one viewer at a time.”
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University who writes extensively about media on his blog PressThink, was also intrigued by Ambinder’s take on blogging. But he’s not sure he sees the same differences between print journalism and online journalism as Ambinder.
“I don’t like to invest formats with that much power,” Rosen said in an interview. “I understand why working on a long, well-researched, fact-checked, heavily edited print magazine story is very different from the activity of blogging. That is super clear to me. But the idea that such stories are not about the author, I’m not sure about that.”
To illustrate his point, Rosen cites a 2004 New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind about then-President Bush.
“I’m sure it was heavily edited and had a lot of reporting in it,” Rosen said. “But to me it’s entirely about Suskind as a journalist, his attempt to get inside the head of the Bush machine. That kind of piece does not represent to me the subsuming of the journalist.”
Michelle Malkin, who writes a political blog and a syndicated newspaper column, agrees that blogs tend to be more personality-driven. But she says there have long been name brands among traditional journalists, from columnists such as Mike Royko and William Safire to reporters such as Michael Kelly, Helen Thomas and Ernie Pyle.
“There’s nothing new about journalists inserting themselves into their narratives,” Malikin told me in an e-mail. “Their readers read them as much for what they had to say as they did for who they were.”
And Malkin welcomes the engagement between online journalists and their readers, even if it can be exhausting at times.
“To the extent that journalism blogging is any more ‘ego intensive’ than traditional journalism, it’s a function of the eroded wall of separation between reader and reporter,” she wrote. “Successful bloggers must engage, react, hyperlink, track back, open up comments, answer their e-mail — or be left in the interactive dust.”
But Malkin said that is “far superior to the closed, Sorbonne-like habitat to which many old media journalists would prefer to retreat.”
Ambinder’s piece generated plenty of reaction online, from dismissals of Ambinder’s return to “dead-tree journalism” to a series of posts at Snarkmarket that took a deeper look at what Ambinder had to say about blogging and journalism.
Snarkmarket’s Matt Thompson took aim at Ambinder’s argument that good journalism is ego-free while blogging is ego-intensive. Thompson provided several examples of good journalism in which the reporter’s assumptions and concerns are part of the narrative, and of bloggers who are successful without leaving a lot of fingerprints. Tim Carmody noted in another post that he regularly reads blogs about technology, but can’t name a single blogger at Engadget. While Ambinder is not comfortable inserting himself into his blog, Carmody says he has had to make the opposite adjustment.
“By training and disposition, I’m a writer, not a reporter,” Carmody wrote. “I’ve had to learn repeatedly what it means to represent an institution rather than just my own ideas and sensibilities — that not every word that appears under my byline is going to be the word I chose. The vast majority of people I meet and interact with don’t care who I am or what I think, just the institution I write for.”
Finally, Robin Sloan tackles Ambinder’s exhaustion with the relentless feedback loop that comes with blogging. Sloan refuses to buy into the argument that the point of blogging is to knock down the walls between journalists and their readers, to allow readers to engage even if that engagement is little more than shouting, name-calling or TYPING IN ALL CAPS!!!
“I think a blog at its best is a dinner party, and if you are the guy who shouts me down whenever I rise to speak, who questions my very motives for throwing this party in the first place: you are not invited,” Sloan writes. “Now, happily, it’s a special kind of dinner party. Anyone can listen in, and the front door is ajar. Come to think of it, there’s probably always an extra place set, Elijah-style. But even so: it’s a space that belongs to its authors, and they set its rules.”
Ambinder says he won’t abandon online and will continue to Tweet, but looks forward to writing without so many personal pronouns. He says he is ready to have an editor “who tells you when something sucks” and orders a piece to be rewritten.
Todd and Rosen both said they would be interested in hearing more from Ambinder about his perception of the differences between blogging and traditional journalists. But Ambinder declined my request for an interview.
Ambinder said in an e-mail that, “in keeping with the spirit of the piece,” he would let his blog post speak for itself.
