Well, the story ran tonight, and it was pretty weak. In fact, the anchor's cutesy alliterative introduction was almost as long as the story itself. "'Blog' was the word of the year! Look what they're doing in the modern university!" So, I'm not going to digitize it -- I was only on screen for one sentence (the same as the professor and student who were interviewed at the same time). However, you can read the text version here -- if you like watching very low quality commercials for US Cellular you can also watch the piece in lo-fi, streaming Windows Media.

This episode puts me in mind of this metapost on the nature of blogging, which I don't believe I've ever posted here, but which struck at the time (and still does) as a good starting point for a real discussion on what blogging means. I found it while writing a short paper on the difficulties in conceptualizing "Internet use" (it's actually a revised version of an academic conference presentation). In that paper, I wrote that the Internet "is as much a media infrastructure as it is a medium," and I think blogging is our first clear evidence of that. Given the infrastructure, a handful of people came up with similar tools to exploit that infrastructure, and a new set of communication standards and practices arose to exploit those tools.

This local TV report (the third recent local media report on this exact subject, for the record) does not begin to discuss what blogging means for education in the future, whether it requires different skills of students than other teaching and learning methods or even what a blog is -- Greg Downey, the professor in question, is given exactly 16 words on-screen to describe what a blog is. Those 16 words are correct, but the many other words that were cut out are the ones that really tell you what blogs do. Not surprisingly, while I watched the reporter set up his camera and tell his interviewees to focus on an imaginary point on the wall, I found myself thinking the same thing I thought during my interview last spring: I knew there was a reason I never had any interest at all in broadcast journalism.