 "Photo: Mary Kang/The Daily Texan")
 "Photo: Illustration by Thu Vo/The Daily Texan")
Richard Gonzalez isn’t a journalist. He doesn’t carry a spiral notebook in his back pocket. He doesn’t work on deadline. His writing, however, attracts more than 100,000 Web hits per month via “Ultra8201,” the Austin music blog he writes with co-founder Joel Richardson.
“Ultra8201” is one of hundreds of Austin-focused blogs that have emerged in the last two years. And with the launch of new local blog aggregate “Austin Post,” the opportunity has increased for blogging to influence the way readers obtain news.
Regardless of who writes it, a blog is successful when it provides something — a perspective or source of information — that is otherwise neglected. From food to politics, from nightlife to gardening, from Sarah Dean’s “The Year of Living Thriftily,” a 12-month chronicling of secondhand shopping, to UT journalism junior Tiffany Tso’s “Austin Is Burning,” an entertainment blog recently dubbed one of Austin’s best by Rare magazine, the advent of the Internet has allowed blogging to flourish.
“The Internet has leveled the playing field,” said Jim McNabb, former KXAN managing editor and 36-year Austin journalist, who now writes media criticism on his own blog, “News McNabb.” “[It] allows ordinary citizens to have a voice... If you can write and if you can develop a following, you can have your own medium for free.”
Consider “Burnt Orange Report,” Matt Glazer’s political blog often viewed as an authority on Texas politics, cited by publications like The New York Times for breaking Texas political news.
“I look at the current state of journalism and see how we have to find a way to fix the problems [that exist],” Glazer said. “If we don’t start to look at citizen journalism as a solution, we’re not going to be able to fill the void.”
This “void” is anything that is being missed by the traditional press — for starters, the ability to comment, voice opposition or provide insight on a highly specific subject.
“Blogs play a crucial role in the dissemination of information,” said Kevin Brass, writer of a regular media column for the Austin Chronicle. “The blogger wants to be the source of discussion — to do things that newspapers don’t want to do.”
Tolly Moseley, 27, writes “Austin Eavesdropper,” a blog that promotes under-the-radar aspects of Austin culture — facets that go unmentioned by mainstream media, such as a profile on an Eastside design collective or the promotion of a literary quarterly’s local event.
“Austin media isn’t big enough to pick up everything,” she said. “Traditional media has an obligation to meet a wide readership, [but] bloggers don’t have to speak to the mainstream.”
Blogs can afford to fit into niches — perhaps the best example of this is the Austin food blog scene, which has exploded thanks largely to Addie Broyles, food blogger for the Austin American-Statesman. Broyles’ organized blogger meet-ups have begun to form a community within the food blogging network, and her blogroll now links to about 90 food blogs within Central Texas, she said.
“Food bloggers in Austin are the best example of the potential of bloggers to form a community,” said Maggie Hoffman, writer for the food blog “Maggie’s Austin.”
Last month, a new blog aggregate called “Austin Post” was created in an attempt to further this ability for community and conversation in local news. The goal of “Austin Post” is to be an alternative media hub, where blog posts by local writers can be published and voted on democratically by readers according to importance.
Using other aggregate Web sites like “The Huffington Post” as a model, if “Austin Post” works it could essentially operate in a Wikipedia-like fashion, where content uploaded by individuals is kept in check by its community of readers. Eventually, the creators hope it will be able to serve as a complete news source with all content coming from blogs, said the blog aggregate’s editor-in-chief Lyssa Myska Allen.
“Austin Post” isn’t perfect; its ambitious business model certainly thrives best on the assumption that entries will be written by citizen journalists who are renegading for truth and aware of journalistic professionalism. However, blogs are usually biased; just as they don’t have to appeal to the masses, they also don’t have to be objective.
“The quality and value of blog content is, to put it tactfully, all over the map,” Kevin Brass wrote last week in an Austin Chronicle article on “Austin Post.” “For every site... manned by passionate writers committed to covering a beat, there are dozens of amateur hacks and wackos offering little more than vitriol and misguided rumor mongering.”
Right now, “Austin Post” has a small paid staff for editorial oversight but is relying primarily on unpaid blog posts to drive its progress, Myska Allen said. And since the Web site’s launch, it has met opposition from experienced journalists — namely, ones who rely on a paycheck, not blog exposure, to put dinner on the table — making it questionable whether seasoned reporters will ever take the aggregate seriously enough to sign on.
However, a few — such as Glazer and McNabb — have joined.
“The proliferation of the sheer number of blogs that exist in Austin shows that people are interested in the idea [of ‘Austin Post’],” Glazer said . “[Right now], ‘Austin Post’ isn’t a solution for professional journalists — it’s a solution for other writers that are already writing [blogs] and want a wider audience.”
With the creation of “Austin Post,” the popularity of local blogs and the increasing ability of blogs to be able to break news before other forms of traditional media, it raises the question: Could a Web site like “Austin Post” ever replace newspapers?
“Citizen journalism is different [than traditional forms of journalism],” Brass said. “It’s important, it plays a role, but it doesn’t replace journalism.”
Austin author and journalist Spike Gillespie, who has voiced public opposition to “Austin Post,” agreed.
“To get really good, accurate, unbiased — or at least an attempt at unbiased — writing, you need to pay your writers,” Gillespie said. “They need to be trained, [and] they need good editors helping them keep tone even and opinion out of the equation.”
Beyond “Austin Post,” like all good publications, the best blogs will rise to the top.
“Content is king,” McNabb said. “Without compelling content that interests or affects people, no medium will succeed for long.”
The blog that will succeed is the one that can capitalize on its benefits — the “voids” it is capable of filling while traditional forms of media lag behind.
“Bloggers are in our ‘yellow journalism’ stage right now, saying basically whatever we want,” Moseley said. “But truly, rants are a dime a dozen. The blogs that have lasted and continue to gain popularity are the ones that are written by individuals who have defined their beat well and report on it with clarity.”
As new paradigms of journalism are created, for now at least, it seems that blogs are here to stay.
“Pandora’s box has opened — citizen journalism is here,” Glazer said. “There’s always going to be somebody who has an opinion that isn’t being expressed, and now that the system exists, it’s not going to change.”
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