Alternative

"Are bloggers journalists? Will they soon replace newspapers?

The best answer to those two questions is: those are two really dumb questions; enough hot air has been expended in their name already."

This from Matt Welch, in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. Welch's essay is a reflection on blogs written in the aftermath of the annual Association of Alternative Newsweeklies conference, where he learns (from the horses' mouths, as it were) that there's really no such thing as an *alternative* newsweekly.

Although he does dismiss such questions as dumb, the one thing that Welch doesn't do is to question whether or not it's worthwhile for weblog(ger)s to take up the mantle of alternativity. He tries to put to rest the idea that weblogs are an alternative journalism, but seems to hope/think/assume that they'll continue to provide an alternative to journalism. I'm ambivalent about this idea, frankly, because I think that the attempt to define any medium as alternative is the quickest way to doom it to (a) co-option and/or (b) exhaustion. The first part of his story, about a collection of faux-alternative, white Boomer hippies and GenX slackers getting together to celebrate the "dull pieties of official progressivism" should be more instructive here than I think it is.

But then, maybe I'll make that point in about ten years, after I've covered the annual Association of Alternative Webloggies conference. And I'll cross my fingers in the meantime.