When you write for a magazine, explicitly or not you adjust your style to match your readers’ expectations. And, if you don’t, your editor will do it for you. No matter how diverse the demographics of the readers, their expectations are usually quite precise, including how much profanity to use, how much description, the number of people interviewed per article, how conspicuous the author herself is in the story, the type of vocabulary, and the nature of the narrative. In short, there is such a thing as a New Yorker article, and you can recognize one even if it’s not in The New Yorker.

Writing a blog is different, and not just because the blogger gets to set the guidelines and expectations, although that’s a big deal in itself. But I think it goes a step further.

A magazine is a filter not just of news and views, but of readers. The content and style of the magazine attracts some readers and repels others. There may be tremendous diversity among the regular readers of a magazine, but, by definition, they all find the magazine interesting and appealing. (Note to the picky: Yes, I’m leaving out regular readers who are doing “opposition research,” etc.) The same is true for weblogs. But, there’s a difference. Weblogs filter readers the way people filter friends. That is, to the extent to which a weblog is a personal expression — leaving out some of the more “professional” blogs — the weblog attracts readers for the same sorts of reasons that people make friends.

Mass media write for mass audiences. Bloggers write for people who know them.

Now, let me back off some of the overly-broad, overly-general claims or inferences. (1) There are as many different types of weblogs as there are different types of writing, so generalizations can only be generally true or false. (2) No, I don’t assume that anyone who reads my blog, or even reads it regularly, is my friend or likes me. (3) Is this less true as you climb the power curve? Maybe. But I’m going to guess that it probably is as true for, say, Doc’s blog or Halley‘s as it is for someone with five regular readers; people read Doc and Halley not just for the quality of their insight but also because, well, they’ve grown to like what they see of them as people. (4) Yes, I read a bunch of blogs written by people I don’t particularly like, but I am asserting (without evidence) that the bloggers are writing for people who do like them.

Categories: Uncategorized dw