Blogging's New Establishment

In the early days of blogging (which, okay, wasn't all that long ago) the blogger was seen a crusader, setting out to slay the mainstream media dragon and bring about a new decentralized and democratizated discourse. Blogs afforded your average Joe the same soapbox as a New York Times reporter or Fox News pundit.

But as Benjamin Carlson writes in The Atlantic, more bloggers are admitting that their profession has been taken over by the same corporations they were supposedly meant to counteract. Matthew Hindman, author of The Myth of Digital Democracy, has declared that "The era when political comment on the Web is dominated by solo bloggers writing for free is gone."

Of Technorati's top 50-ranked blogs, 21 are owned by such familiar names as CNN, The New York Times, ABC, and AOL. And those gather about 42 percent of all blog traffic. Single-handed start-ups like Talking Points Memo and TechCrunch now have staffs of a dozen or more. And the rise of the big brands have shut out the smaller players - a full 94 percent of the blogs counted in Technorati's 2008 State of the Blogosphere report are no longer publishing. What it means, then, is that the blogosphere has just become the new-media feather in the old vanguard's cap.

(Photo via Adrian Sampson via Flickr/Creative Commons)