By Craig Colgan
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, Aug. 2, 2002

Links at the Hardball Web site within MSNBC.com prominently point to Chris Matthews's latest book, his newspaper column, his show's daily e-mail newsletter, and since May to his "weblog," or "blog," a link-filled, regularly updated diary of items important and otherwise, with accompanying commentary.

Here is a recent entry on Matthews's blog, a few days before he left his show to recover from malaria: "And next weekend Al Gore will attend the Firestone 200 car race at Nashville Superspeedway. I can't wait to see that. This guy lost everything below the Mason Dixon Line. He'll be out there with rednecks trying to identify with beer-drinking good old boys. I wonder what costume he'll show up in. Will it be the earth tones, the blue suit, or perhaps something more racy? If Al Gore has his way, he'll not only make it to Mount Rushmore, he'll be all four faces."

Clicking on the words "earth tones" and "the blue suit" takes you to photos of the fashion-diverse candidate himself at algore04.com, and the "racy" link connects to a photo of pop star Britney Spears decked out in a tight leather racing suit leaning dangerously close to hunky NASCAR star driver Jeff Gordon.

Evans & Novak, this ain't. But the form will soon have its best opportunity to make its case to a wider audience.

Weblogs arrived in the late '90s, thought up by savvy Net writers seeking to make better use of the Web's capabilities. Bloggers never sought to emulate mainstream journalists; they defined their endeavor as a totally new venture. Bloggers linked to each other and steadily built readership. Linking also gives bloggers opportunities to make their cases stronger, or in some rare instances, to connect readers to writers and ideas with which bloggers may actually disagree -- or in the case of Chris Matthews's blog (taken directly from his show script), to have some fun around serious issues.

The blogs and their accompanying links can quickly create multiple dialogues that can be much more engaging to many younger Net-savvy information consumers than the typical Frank Rich exposition in The New York Times. Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, chose a name for his popular blog that defines the process: "InstaPundit."

MSNBC.com, consistently ranked among the top news destinations on the Web, is about to invest a chunk of important virtual real estate into the blog concept. MSNBC.com has killed its discussion boards, with their 18 million posts per month, and instead plans to establish by the end of August what it will call "Weblog Central," a portal of regularly updated lists of blogs from throughout the Web, arranged by subject. It will include links to MSNBC.com's own blogs as well.

"The boards were often chaotic, off-topic and not conducive to the kind of civil and coherent communities we want to develop on this news site," said Joan Connell, an MSNBC.com executive producer. "We hope that weblogs will provide that coherence and bring like-minded people together to consider topics of mutual interest." Connell added that in the event of another news story of the magnitude of September 11, blogs will be a major part of the site's coverage. In other words, a mighty media organization has realized that this new form on the fringes of the Web may be about to cross over a threshold, beyond quirky trend to establishment acceptance. Eyeballs and ad dollars may follow.

One of the best newsy blogs is "The Note," from the politics section of ABCNews.com. Many of the post-9/11 blogs are operated by full-throated Bush supporters, giving blogging a reputation as a conservative haven. (More evidence: Evangelical Christian blogs are sprouting regularly.) Conservative Andrew Sullivan is the first of the established, traditional media essayists to commit to the form. But one of the hottest recent crossover bloggers roars in from the left: Eric Alterman, who writes for The Nation and whose raucous blog, also found on MSNBC.com, is called "Altercation."

"For me, it is therapy," Alterman said in an interview. "I don't think the form itself is going to be influential. Established media needs to be shaken up now more than ever, but I am not sure this will do it. Some webloggers out there say that it will, but I don't exactly see how what I write, or what Glenn Reynolds writes, threatens George Will as much as George Will needs to be threatened."

"I don't see any major media outlet abandoning its tried-and true practices in favor of weblogs," said Rebecca Blood, a blogger pioneer and the author of The Weblog Handbook. "I see them-wisely-experimenting to see what the form has to offer them. In a few years, I think we will see the weblog format routinely used by major media to do the things it is best suited to do: filter information, organize frequently updated information in a way that allows readers to quickly identify new content, and summarize complex stories with pointers to more detailed sources of information."

Craig Colgan is a Washington-based writer. His e-mail address is craigcolgan@aol.com.

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