gatewatching

Among the consequences of the emergence of the opinion-led blogosphere are, on the one hand, news organisations bringing prominent bloggers “inside the tent”, and on the other, presenting their op-ed writers work in a “blog-like” format. Whether you think that’s just due recognition of the affordances of blogging and the ’sphere’s emerging talent, or lip service and the co-optation of alternative voices will depend on what you think blogging is for.

What’s interesting to me is that, in turn, this allows differences of opinion within media organisations to emerge pretty well instantaneously. Today, for instance, Blogocracy’s Tim Dunlop has done a long post about his disagreeement with the underlying logic of a column by Malcolm Colless, published in this morning’s Australian.

I guess that, once upon a time, this kind of disagreement might have played out over a few days in the opinion columns (assuming, that is, that somebody like Dunlop would have been invited by the Oz to write a column in reply). Now Dunlop can have his say as soon as he’s read and digested what’s in the morning papers.

This kind of disagreement is healthy, and it’s interesting to watch it play out. Of course, the revival of the poll wars reminds us that news organisations, for the moment, can sometimes find a diversity of opinion, and the specific nature of blogging, difficult to accommodate. Dunlop famously had a post removed last year, that was critical of The Australian’s role in the first skirmish of the poll wars. On that occasion, the print side of the News empire asserted its preeminence, but it may be that organisations will get better at managing intra-organisational disagreement, if for no other reason than that it’s bound to engage their readers. Conflict=drama.

When we compare the comments on Dunlop’s post to, say, those on the posts of his News colleague, Andrew Bolt, what we see is a similarly diverse audience across News’s web-facing outlets. It would be great to do some in-depth work to confirm this, but it’s likely that there are Dunlop fans that never read a Bolt column and vice versa. It’s certain that there are people who have commented on one and would never consider doing so on the the other’s posts. Maybe these different authors provide “hotspots” for different communities of opinion under the same masthead. No doubt there are surprising connections between them, and finding out what those might be would be another fruitful area of research.