How Big is the Blogging Phenomenon?

This article at American Digest spells it out incredibly well:

Every Number Tells A Story, Don't It?

How big is the blogsphere's mouth? Hard to say. But let's look at one of the big bad blog boys on the block, Glenn Renyolds. His Instapundit.com — reports that for August 31, "Over 310,000 pageviews yesterday, and just shy of 6 million last month. Thanks for coming by." In addition, his site has nearly 6,500 other sites linking to it [including this one. Ed.].

As an old media magazine hand, I have to say that these numbers alone are staggering. More than 300,000 readers in one day? That's bigger by an order of magnitude than the combined weekly circulations of The Nation, The New Republic, and just about any other 10 political opinion magazines you want to throw in from here and Europe combined.

If Instapudit were a newspaper it would be would be the 26th largest newspaper out of the Top 100 Daily Newspapers in the United States — between the Miami Herald and the Denver Post. If the newspaper owners of the United States had any insight at all this little factoid would make their either reach for their checkbooks or eat their gun.

I had no idea that any blogs were that well read! I know why: there are some absolutely knock-you-down-brilliant bloggers out there who cover every aspect of just about every issue you could want to read about. Check my links to the left to see just a tiny fraction of the good stuff that's out there, for free, every day. I no longer bother to read most major newspapers*, because their relevance and timeliness are both in serious decline.

There are certainly dangers in getting your news only from the blogs: bias isn't necessarily one of them. Bias in blogdom is big, bold, brassy, up-front, and proudly trumpeted. Bias in the dead-tree press is still a dirty secret — many newspapers still portray themselves to their readers as (and for all I know, honestly believe themselves to be) objective, dispassionate, rational and non-biased in their news coverage.

Modern journalists are in many ways trapped by their own background and training: the world may be shifting around them, but they are still trying to use the structures and methodologies of twenty or thirty years ago to analyze and present the issues of the day. Their default assumptions are that people are incapable of taking care of themselves to a lesser or greater degree; that corporations are evil; that government really is here to help you and that no government program is ever wrong or misguided.

Given those pre-existing conditions, you'd be damned hard-pressed to make sense of a lot of the events of the modern age, but when most of your colleagues hold the same or harder-core versions of those beliefs, you carry on. The other members of the tribe are also rubbing blue mud in their navels, like they always did, so it must still be right to do it now.

Blogging is not the revolution. It will not overthrow the Media Big Brother.

It doesn't need to: Big Brother is dead, he just hasn't stopped twitching yet.

And there's always the strong possibility that Media's bigger brother, the government, will step in and apply the paddles to the corpse. "Live, damn you, Live! I need you!"