The Evolution of Blogging: An Interview with Rod Dreher

People seemed to dig the interview I did with Kevin Drum around his thoughts on the evolution of blogging as a medium over the past seven years, so we’ve decided to turn that one-off into a series of interviews with a variety of bloggers who’ve been engaged in the art of the immediate for some time. Our next interview is with the original Crunchy Con himself, Rod Dreher, who got his start in 2002 when NRO started The Corner. Rod has moved on to work for The Dallas Morning News, publish his own Crunchy Con blog at Beliefnet, and co-found the always interesting Front Porch Republic (and he even managed to turn the interview around on me at one point).

Many thanks to Rod for taking the time to offer his insights into our beloved fishbowl.

Let’s start from the beginning: when did you start blogging and what was the cause/reason for the decision?

I started blogging back in 2002, I suppose, when I was a writer at National Review, and we decided to launch The Corner. I think all of us on staff were surprised by how much fun it was, and how much our readers loved it.

I left NR in the spring of 2003 and moved to Dallas. Not long after that, my boss and I launched a blog for the Dallas Morning News editorial board, the first one of its kind in the country. They’re fairly common now on ed boards, but ours was the first. I kept blogging from time to time on The Corner, though much less than when I was an NR staffer.

The magazine’s editors were kind enough to give me a six-week blog in early 2006 to promote my book “Crunchy Cons,” and that led to my Beliefnet blog, which I’ve been at for 3 ½ years. The number of page views on my current blog has increased between sevenfold and tenfold from that first month (the numbers fluctuate because blog readership tends to be seasonal). Blogging isn’t my main job, but without question it’s how I’m best known outside of Dallas.

Whenever I get a call to appear on a national media program, it’s always because of something on my blog. This past summer, it was a delight to be in England and to meet a reader of my Crunchy Cons blog, who showed me around his town for a day.

I learned early on about how useful blogging could be in advancing a story. The Catholic sex abuse scandal broke big out of Boston right after I joined National Review in early 2002. I wrote about it for the magazine and National Review Online, but it was my blogging on The Corner that helped aggregate and disseminate reporting and blogging on the scandal from around the country. Catholics, especially conservative Catholics, learned to go to blogs like Amy Welborn’s and Mark Shea’s, to which I constantly linked, for reliable news and commentary on the scandal.

I firmly believe that if it hadn’t been for the roles blogs played in passing around news and commentary about the scandal, the story would have been easier to manage, and wouldn’t have been nearly as big a deal.

So given that you spent part of your time blogging and part of your time on non-blogging, more traditional journalistic writing, how do you find that your work in those two spheres influence on another (both in a positive and a negative sense, if applicable)?

I almost always try out ideas I’m considering for my column on my blog. Or rather, to be more precise, I get my column ideas from what I’ve written about on the blog – ideas and topics that seem to generate the most discussion, and indeed the most fruitful discussion.

My blog really is like a writer’s and a pundit’s notebook, where I take note of whatever’s crossed my eyeballs that day that’s struck me as interesting, important or worthy of bringing to the attention of others. Some readers misunderstand this, and will leave comments saying things like, “Why are so you worried about X. when you never say anything about Y.?”

I don’t aim to write a comprehensive blog? Who could?

For example, when I write about pure politics (as distinct from culture and cultural politics), I tend to criticize conservatives more than I do liberals, even though I’m a conservative. That’s because the problems on the conservative side – our contradictions and our challenges – are more interesting and important to me than picking out the faults and the foibles of liberals. Believe me, I’m pleased that there are plenty of right-of-center bloggers who do just that, and do it better than I do. But that’s not my calling, at least not right now.

I write about what interests me, not what somebody thinks I should write about out of some sort of obligation. If I felt that I had to run to the barricades to comment critically on everything Obama or the Democrats did, my blog would soon ring false. Anyway, policy is not my thing; religion, culture and cultural politics are.

I do find, though, that I am far more careful about what I write for print, particularly in terms of the style, because somehow it feels more permanent. I tend to agonize over my columns, trying to get the exact phrasing down. I rarely ever give my blogs a second look before posting, in part because I know I can always go back and correct, amend, and so forth.

Something I wonder about: do I have more passion for my blog than my column because blogging is a 24/7 enterprise, while my column only runs once a week? Or is it more the case that I don’t know many people who read my column (or anybody’s column), but most people I know follow my blog, or somebody’s blog, far more closely than they do the conventional print media?

In truth, I think it’s both. When I was in journalism school back in the 1980s, you’d often hear students and our professors talking about this or that writer’s column. I almost never hear that nowadays – but I do hear people under 45 talking about bloggers and their opinions quite a bit, and sending around links to each other. To be honest, if it weren’t for other bloggers (and, to be honest, Googlereader), I wouldn’t know what the mainstream newspaper columnists were saying on any given day. I take my cues on what I need to pay attention to from the mainstream via blogs, both group blogs and individual blogs, that I’ve learned to trust, even if I don’t agree with them all the time.

This is why I keep reading Andrew Sullivan, even though he often drives me crazy with this Christianism nonsense, and his other obsessions. I find him maddening, but also smart and interesting. I find it hard to not read him, if only because the things he finds interesting I often find interesting, and worth thinking about – maybe even blogging on.

You’ve come under some fire for your tendency to focus more on criticizing conservatives on your blog than liberals. Do you believe that blogs are the right place to hash out those kinds of differences intra-ideologically?

Yes. Where else would we do it?

You can have give and takes on blogs that you can’t have in a magazine or in a newspaper. Besides, a lot of this stuff is of not interest to general readers. I have one column each week, and I’m not likely to devote it to cracking on whatever obnoxious thing Mark Levin said that day.

Besides, I may be able to say what I need to say about Levin in a couple of paragraphs. Newspapers aren’t formatted for writing like that. Besides, if I’m wrong, I want my readers to tell me so, and to tell me why. It might sound impossibly naïve, but I’m not so much interested in telling my readers what to believe as I am in finding out the truth, and collaborating with them in that search.

When I was speaking to Kevin Drum about his experience, he attributed some of the unwillingness to engage in such a conversational and less formal mode of communication on blogs to their rise in prominence. Do you think Kevin is correct in that assessment? If not, why not? If so, what are the gains and trade offs of that increased prominence?

Kevin may be onto something. The blogs I like to read regularly – like this one, I’m pleased to say – are sites that aren’t predictable, and which seem more interested in examining ideas and issues than in rallying the side. I’ve quit reading more than a few blogs I used to pay attention to because I got bored with them. I like to read as widely as possible, from a diverse number of sources, but with so much to choose from online, why waste limited time on agitprop of the left or the right?

I suppose I limit my readership because I’m not interested in being part of a mob, but I can live with that. My blog has to represent who I am and what I think – and I am a less partisan writer than I was seven or eight years ago. Again, because I am a conservative and my blog is identified as conservative, some readers can’t figure out why I don’t often jump on the latest conservative memes – because that’s what many conservative blogs do. Not me. I’m just not into that anymore. Then again, my blog isn’t really influential. I hope it’s enlightening, entertaining, provocative and thoughtful, but I think if you want to be influential in terms of moving the public debate significantly, you have to pick a side and fight hard on that side.

Obviously, there’s a place for that kind of blog, but I’m not terribly interested in reading them, or writing like them.

So then do you see some problems with Kevin’s other suggestion that one way bloggers can better utilize the prominence of their sites is by catalyzing greater momentum towards “real world action”, insofar as said action tends to be geared towards energizing a particular “base” towards achieving particular goals rather than catalyzing more discussion as you seem to prefer with blogging. And as a follow up, do you think it is a very practical idea to have bloggers like yourself and, perhaps, the bloggers of the League working towards catalyzing their own readers into real world actions that brings a stronger focus on the exchange of ideas back in the practice of politics?

Well, I think Kevin is probably correct to say that one is likely to garner more page views when one takes a certain partisan stance on a hot issue, and fights like hell for it. My biggest month ever in page views was October 2008, just before the presidential election. I’m sure that’s true for all politically-oriented blogs, but the posts of mine that really spiked page views were those fiercely defending Sarah Palin against the vicious onslaught right after she was tapped as McCain’s running mate. (Of course, once she started talking, I realized that she was a terrible pick, and quit defending her.) Loads of traffic was driven to my site by conservative blogs saying, “Yeah! Megadittoes!” and by liberal blogs saying, “Can you believe this creep?!” That was fun, mostly, and as I’m paid by the page view, it certainly put money in my pocket.

But I don’t want to run a hyper-partisan, activist blog, and would be terrible at it in any case. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong in principle with such a blog; it’s only that it ill-suits the kind of writer I am, and have come to be. I am more interested in exploring ideas, especially the nuances and ironies inherent in ideas, controversies and phenomena, than I am in urging my readers to come together and get this or that thing done. If readers are moved to get active around a certain issue or cause because of what I write, fantastic, I’m glad for them. Seriously! But I am temperamentally a non-joiner, and would rather not give my blog over to advocacy. One commenter at my blog wrote that I strike her as the kind of person who asks, “What is the truth here?” rather than “What is someone like me supposed to believe?” That made me happy, because that’s the kind of person, and blogger, that I want to be.

Your follow-up question makes me realize that one thing I do advocate, if only by example, is the serious consideration of ideas, and thoughtful dialogue among liberals, conservatives and moderates about ideas. It’s one of the reasons the League is one of my favorite blogs; I am often surprised and challenged by what I read here, and I know it’s not the kind of place I’m going to go to have my prejudices confirmed. It’s just more interesting to read that kind of blog.

It’s also one of the reasons I find The New Republic such a compelling magazine, even though I don’t share its politics. They often throw change-ups, and are willing to criticize their own side. That’s far more rare than it should be these days. Anyway, I think to the extent that the League, Crunchy Con and other bloggers can keep focusing on ideas, we can lead by example. That seems like a weak answer, I guess, but I don’t think you get very far by hectoring people to eat their spinach. I don’t prefer ideas blogs (e.g., on the Right, Front Porch Republic, versus Power Line) because I think they’re good for me; I prefer them because I think they’re more fun, and because I have more to learn from them (which is, you know, fun). I think our audiences will never be as large as the partisan blogs, though.

What sort of beneficial “real world actions” do you think we might catalyze our readers into undertaking?

That’s a good question. For me it is still very much a working hypothesis, but a lot of what I mean is actions that take what we and our readers do online into the fabric of our lives in more explicit fashion. Bringing the civil back into civil society.

How that looks will, for obvious reasons, be different for different people. But I think the key element is enacting that spirit of valuing exchanges of ideas and developing a critical faculty that doesn’t relay on partisan hackery in one’s everyday life. The idea is really around building a degree of community that encourages, fosters, and supports exactly what you’ve described your blog and the blogs you like to read engaging in.

That could look like having just those kinds of discussions with family and friends, in church, PTA meetings, community groups, recreational sports teams. It could also look like people going out and finding different avenues within their community to engage in this way than they have before, finding new community and not-for-profit groups that address issues they care about, but in a generative fashion that isn’t a zero-sum exercise. It might even mean that people go out and start those groups themselves, if they don’t find what they’re looking for in their searches.

It might mean people who have never done so before, getting involve in local politics, joining parties and bringing a strong focus on just this kind of discourse to those parties. It might mean going out and finding various campaigns of which to be a part and voicing support for strategies and tactics that allow for this kind of discourse. It might mean finding particular candidates one feels that one sees these attributes in and becoming active in their campaigns. And, of course, it could and probably will mean a whole host of things of which I haven’t thought.

The point at which I’m driving, though, and you’ve done a good job of turning this interview around on me a bit, which is fine because this is an issue about which I feel strongly, is to find diffuse manners of building this kind of community for intelligent debate and discourse that focuses on a strong and constructive exchange and taking the next step of having that community feeling like getting involved and trying to influence the outcome of the political process isn’t, in and of itself, an act of sullying their integrity.

And so, to a large degree, I’m suggesting a conscious act of re-engaging folks who have, by and large, become pretty disengaged in the meat and potatoes of politics over the last few decades. That strikes me as a worthwhile endeavour in which our blogs might engage.

Thoughts?

Sorry to turn the interview around.

One way I have managed to build a fairly diverse (ideologically speaking) readership, and hold on to them, is by pretty severely policing my comboxes. It was horrible at first, but I finally got Beliefnet to consent to let me manage my own comboxes. And I was ruthless in striking comments that attacked me or others on the site personally, and in kicking off comments – and even commenters – who trolled the site, and whose comments made civil dialogue impossible. Some of these were liberals, others were conservatives.

My view is that if you come into a combox thread and carry on in a way that would drive people away from a conversation at a party, then I will show you the door. It took a long, long time to establish a sense among my readers of the kind of social rules we were going to follow in the comboxes, and there was plenty of caterwauling about how I was trying to quash free speech. But I also heard from readers who said one reason they keep coming back to my site is because the comments threads are actually worth reading – meaning they aren’t just rants and shouting. Other readers said they normally don’t comment on blog threads because to do so is to invite being dogpiled. They know I don’t allow that on my site, so they feel more open to participation. I love that – but it didn’t come easily. I’ve been doing the site for three years, and it’s only in the past few months that I have been able to relax somewhat on the beat.

Still, I must delete 15 to 20 comments per day on a slow-to-average day, and many more when I have a hot issue (usually something involving homosexuality). But there’s really no other way to make the site worth participating in, in terms of an online discussion community. I learn a lot from my more thoughtful readers. There’s one reader who is a transgendered woman. We’ve argued a lot, but I have a lot of respect for her, and she’s made me think of things differently. Interestingly, one area in which we’ve bonded is over using violence, if necessary, to fight bullies. We’re both gun nuts in that respect. We’re never going to agree on human sexuality, but if any bully tried to break into her house and hurt her, I’d be thrilled if she’d kneecap the SOB.

Do you feel like blogging has become less civil than when you first got going at NRO?

That’s hard to say, because there was so little blogging back then, or so it seems to me in retrospect.

I remember Andrew Sullivan and I got into a hellacious back and forth over something to do with homosexuality; we have had one of those a year, I guess. If blogging has become less civil, or appears to have done, I think it’s a function of there being more people blogging, and the incentive to become more outrageous as a way to make yourself heard above the pack. Few of us can say that we’ve never been uncivil in our blogging – I certainly can’t say I stand behind everything I’ve written in that regard. But I think when top bloggers like Sullivan (to pick the most prominent example) go berserk on certain issues (e.g, Sully’s Trig Trutherism), it licenses the same sort of unhinged reaction from others.

It’s a tough thing to write with immediacy but also to keep your own emotions in check, as I seem to learn every couple of weeks, after I’ve gone straight to the blog with a rash reaction that I later regret. I think that as blogging has become a mainstream form of opinion discourse, the emotionalism that’s more essential to the form (because there aren’t any editors to check one’s posts, and one usually doesn’t give oneself time to cool off before posting) has become more mainstream as well. So without quite realizing it, we bloggers may have consciously or not given ourselves permission to be less civil, because the format rewards immediacy and spontaneity, which works against second-thinking.

This is a roundabout way of saying yes to your question.

Certainly the increase in voices will have an impact. Do you think the increase in signal that blogging’s democratization of social and political commentary is worth the reciprocal increase in noise?

I suppose so.

Most of the opinion and commentary I read and take seriously – almost all of it, actually – comes from blogs. I can easily filter out the noise by simply not paying attention to those blogs. And I get to read opinions that never would have made it into the MSM when I started in this business, and don’t make it there now.

Where are the Front Porch Republic guys being published? Daniel Larison is emerging as a major new voice on the Right, and that’s thanks entirely to the blogosphere. I’d trade any number of syndicated columnists for one Larison. So, personally, the good far outweighs the bad.

As for looking at it from a broader social perspective, blogging is displacing the old media as an arbiter of opinion, and as an establisher of the bounds of discourse. I’m positive but deeply ambivalent about this. I welcome the diversity, especially because old media is often so blinkered and parochial in its worldview. But at the same time, it devalues the expertise and authority that more established commentators in the media have, in some cases, worked hard to build, and which have real value.

E.J. Dionne, for example, may be wrong about this or that particular issue, but he’s a serious thinker and an experienced reporter. The idea that his opinion counts as much or even less than some glib loudmouth with a blog is to be regretted. But at this point, there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Finally, as someone who, again, has a foot in each world, do you see a way that “old media” and “new media” could better function together to the overall benefit of the readers themselves. And given that this interview is about the evolution of blogging, what might we “trail blazers” of new media do to hasten that more productive partnership?

Well, if I may be allowed to toot my own horn, I am pretty sure I pioneered a marriage of the best of old and new opinion media when I invented the Dallas Morning News’ Opinion Home site.

Every morning I get up at five, and spend the next two or three hours going over the op-ed pages of major papers, magazine websites, and blogs, searching for the most interesting commentary available that morning. I post it to the DMN’s online opinion page, which also contains material from our print product editorial and op-ed pages. The idea is to bring online readers the best of new and old media. I think it’s a great idea – but our readers don’t agree. We’ve had it up for a year, but the readership numbers have been disappointing.

I think a lot has to do with the difficulty of navigating the DMN’s website, plus the fact that nobody knows we’re there. Maybe, though, it was simply not a good idea on my part, or I’m executing it poorly. I really don’t know. But I believe it’s something good for readers, and I think old media would do well to embrace bloggers in a similar way.

I also really get tired of the blogosphere’s crowing about itself, and its superiority to old media. Some of it is true, but if the old media went away tomorrow, what would we blog about? What would be the basis for so much of what we post? I think it’s key for smart bloggers to make contact with decision-makers within old media, and make sure they’re reading the bloggers’ stuff.

When I was editing the Sunday commentary section at the News, I would from time to time ask a blogger for permission to edit a good blog for publication, and put it in the newspaper. I can’t remember if we paid them – I think we did give them something – but I can tell you newspaper budgets are crashing hard. Bloggers who are writing first-rate stuff for free could make a little bit of money from newspapers publishing their stuff (as well as enjoy much greater exposure for their blogs), and newspapers strapped for affordable commentary could benefit as well.

I think a discerning editor from the blogosphere would do well to line up a stable of lesser-known bloggers who aren’t affiliated with a magazine or newspaper, and “syndicate” their work to op-ed editors at newspapers around the country. That editor could offer their commentary to newspapers at a highly competitive rate; the object would not be to make a lot of money for the blogger (no columnist makes money on syndication), but to gain the blogger greater exposure. The upside for the newspaper would be to bring fresh new voices from the outside to their readers at a price they can afford. For all the attention given to the blogosphere, unless you’re somebody like Andrew Sullivan or Jonah Goldberg, you’re still going to get far more readers by appearing on the pages of the Dallas Morning News than on your small-bore blog, no matter how excellent your commentary on that blog is.

So, to recap: a discerning reader of small, high-quality blogs should assemble a consortium to offer daily commentary to op-ed editors around the country, at bargain prices. It can be hard – really hard – to break through to them, because in many cases they’re older, and not keen on the blogosphere. But the grave economic crisis newspapers are living through now is forcing all of us to cut back greatly, and to look for new sources of commentary.

There’s opportunity there for a middleman with the right sensibility and connections in both the blogosphere and within the newspaper industry.

Tagged as: blogging, rod dreher