gatewatching

UPDATE: Grodscorp’s weekly podcast, this time including discussion of the Blair move, is here. NSFW - frequent coarse language.

I think it’s fair to say that we here at Gatewatching have had an… interesting relationship with Tim Blair’s blog since we started posting here last year. I won’t go over the details of our spat - you can check out the archives if you like. In some ways a fight with Blair has probably become a rite of passage in the Australian blogosphere. Anyway, news is that he’s moved his blog onto the site of his main employer, the Daily Telegraph.

Blair’s blog has been one of the most successful Australian efforts in terms of traffic, not least because he’s been able to draw an international readership. He’s moved through several hosting set-ups - first on blogspot, then spleenville, then to the place he was blogging until today, timblair.net. All of this, apparently, has been independent of his work on the Bulletin and then the Tele as an editor and columnist. Now his blog has been integrated on the paper’s main site, and it esembles those of his News Limited colleagues Andrew Bolt, and Tim Dunlop (author of Blogocracy).

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Blair, Daily Telegraph, blogging Blair, blogging, Blogocracy, Bolt, Daily Telegraph, Dunlop, Grods, Larvatus Prodeo, MSM, news.com.au

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.

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blogging, media blogging, Bolt, Dunlop, journalism, media, news.com.au, poll wars, psephology, The Australian