Does Writing A Blog Make You An Instant Authority?
Larry King interviewed the apoplectic comedian Lewis Black tonight on CNN (30 minutes past the end of the broadcast and it’s still not linkable – is this the internet age or not? No seriously, I’ll try to link to it when it’s available.)
Last question from Larry was about whether or not the rumor was true: had Black started a blog? Absolutely not. “I refuse to blog,” said Black, continuing:
…just because you can type on a screen doesn’t give you legitimacy as an authority on anything.
King: Anyone can blog, right? [Typically sycophantic, notice how Larry turns from being willing to plug Black’s hypothetical new non-existent blog to immediately bashing the concept for blogging itself – based, of course, on his guest’s answer.]
Black: Everybody does! [Minor epileptic fit ensues.] …you used to have to put up a degree!
He’s right of course.
You’re going to have a hard time blogging regularly about a subject that you don’t know anything about. And while you know everything about your own personal life, and are therefore immediately the world’s foremost expert on everything relevant to your own personal diary-type blog, that’s not true for ‘professional’ blogging.
Has Lewis Black reached his saturation point yet? The schtick was funny at first, but the angry epileptic thing is wearing real thin.
I think the answer to the question in the headline is "sort of."
The process of writing forces you to research a topic, think about it creatively (one hopes), put your thoughts in prose in a logical fashion, and typically learn something about the topic yourself as you go. By the end of that, anyone who approached the process with an open mind likely learned more by producing the blog post than readers will from reading it. At least that's my own experience.
As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of them stink. But if you follow the same topic, data, and processes over time, anyone with institutional memory becomes a relative expert because the MSM reports everything as "news" but frequently gives little context.