(2002-02-04) Andrew Sullivan Blog Manifesto

(Just catching the old Feb'02 WebLog Manifesto from Andrew Sullivan.) What it basically means is that a writer no longer needs a wealthy proprietor to get his message across to readers. He no longer needs an editor, either... But it's still true that bloggers are perhaps among the first writers to have the medium direct them rather than the other way round. Most non-blogger web journalism is still a little like television in the 1950s. To begin with, television simply plonked radio show formats on the air, before they figured out what the new medium could do best. What many magazines and newspapers now do online is somewhat similar: they just put on a screen a pixilated version of what they already do on paper. But what bloggers do is completely new - and cannot be replicated on any other medium. It's somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio. It's genuinely new. And it harnesses the web's real genius - its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. It's a new medium finally finding a unique voice.