‘Blogger’ or ‘columnist’ — there is a difference

Although some of these weekly efforts may not reflect it, I have been at this column-writing business for quite a few years now.

Fifty-two, if you want to count early experience first as the sports editor and then the editor of my award-winning high school newspaper, The Cavalier, at Castle Heights Military Academy. Maybe down to as few as 35 if you take out time spent in the Army, working in the home offices of Holiday Inns in Memphis, Tenn., and as executive director of the Montana Newspaper Association, although I did quite a bit of that sort of thing for the regular MNA bulletin.

I don’t even pretend to have kept very many of those columns, and editorials, but the simplest math would produce a number of somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 regular columns, and maybe even another 1,500 or so editorials, because there were more of those needed in a week at a daily newspaper. (And, just for the record, several hundred of both the columns and the editorials came in a prior stint at The Forum and then for the Maryville Free Press.)

And now I wonder if I could — or should — be adding a new category to my resume — that of “blogger?”

I guess most people who write now write for the Internet now strive to be bloggers. I find that a little difficult to understand because I have always thought my commentary — both as a local columnist as well as the editorial writer for whatever newspaper I was calling “home” at the time — was basically for local consumption and not necessarily of interest to somebody halfway across the country, or around the world, for that matter.

Technically, a blog is defined as a “Weblog” with its entries “written in chronological order and displayed in reverse chronological order.”

Quite simply, they are online journals, usually reflecting a particular opinion — and there are an estimated 70 million of them, among 150 million Web sites. And there are 10,000 more sites coming online each and every hour.

Believe it; I can’t.

Even more incomprehensible is this statistic: 210 billion e-mails are sent every day. I don’t think that counts text messages either, and I have a friend whose teenage daughter sends/receives as many as 275 a day. And we’re not even talking about the newest rage — twitter.

As far as the volumes of information are concerned, forget your old megabites that used to define how much horsepower you had in your computer. Now you can say “goodbye” to the even gigabyte and “hello” to the exabyte, five of which are worth 37,000 Libraries of Congress.

In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By 2010, it is estimated that this number will increase to 988.

According to a recent comprehensive article in the Columbia Journalism Review, news consumers, even young ones, are overpowered by the amount of information available.

The information age is defined by output: far more information is produced than can possibly be managed, let alone absorbed. Before the digital era, information was limited by our means to contain it. Publishing was restricted by paper and delivery costs; broadcasting was circumscribed by available frequencies and airtime. The Internet, on the other hand, has unlimited capacity at near-zero cost.

“The gatekeeping metaphor worked pretty well in the 20th century, but maybe what news organizations should be now is not gatekeepers so much as guides,” according to the CJR piece by Bree Nordenson. “You don’t want gatekeepers that can say you can get this and you can’t get that. You want people who can guide you through all this stuff.”

The results from extensive research originally conducted on behalf of the Associated Press indicate that all too often when faced with overpowering volumes of information, the tendency of news consumers is to become passive in the face of too much information. A “There’s so much here, I give up,” attitude. And more than ever before now, what people read — in whatever form — is what is of interest to them. “Don’t expect me to read the whole Time or Newsweek, give me something like The Week and call it good.”

But still, the traditional news sources such as the AP, the BBC or CNN have a valuable role to play in organizing the vast amount of news and commentary that is being hurled at us. According to the CJR story, “Information is one of the things that in the end needs brands almost more than anything else. It needs a recommendation, a seal of approval, something that says it is reliable or true ….

“The future of news depends on the willingness of journalistic organizations to adjust to the new ecology and new economy of information in the digital age.”

So perhaps it is a better idea for me to stick to columns printed in the newspaper and let the digital gurus decide what of it needs to be online. Besides, I think “columnist” sounds more dignified, and authentic, than “blogger” anyway.