Bloggasm

Matt Welch, a recently-hired opinion editor for the Los Angeles Times, has been editing and writing for various news outlets since the early nineties. These outlets include Reason Online, Canada’s National Post, LA Weekly, ESPN.com, Salon, Wired News, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Aside from his writing and editing, he has also consulted for a variety of media start-up companies, including Digital Entertainment Network and Tabloid.com.

On top of his regular journalism, he also maintains his own blog.

Simon Owens: Has there ever been any conflics of interest between your blogging life and your life as a Times opinion editor?

Matt Welch: Not yet! Except for the fundamental conflict, which is that they’d prefer I didn’t prattle on too much about the Times on my private site, and that if I’m uncorking some stemwinder, I make sure it’s something that they would not be interested in me pitching to them first. Since my personal site has devolved into a more sporadic beast, with lots of travel photos, obscure Angels statistics, and cranky ruminations about the Santa Barbara News-Press, I think I’m on mostly firm footing. The biggest thing is that I just don’t have nearly as much time, even to read blogs, let alone type on mine. I’ve also been working on making a record, so it’s been a kind of double-whammy.

Simon Owens: Have you ever heard of newspapers discouraging their journalists to blog?

Matt Welch: Sure, happens all the time, I reckon. I first wrote a piece about this back in 1999 or so for the Online Journalism Review, entitled “What Do You Tell Your Boss?” or some such. Back then, people like Romenesko (who I interviewed for the thing) generally had full-time jobs at newspapers, if you can believe it, and many worked for people who had absolutely no clue that their employees were accomplished, popular bloggers. Nowadays I think things just depend on the institution; I will point out that even if there are plenty of selective cases of cracking down you can find, institutions, generally speaking, are launching blogs like crazy. We’ve launched three in the Opinion Section alone since I’ve been here, with more on the way.

Simon Owens: As someone who covered Nader’s 2000 campaign, what are some of the main reasons that he wasn’t as successful in 2004? Was it more than just a backlash for possibly costing Gore the election?

Matt Welch: Let’s count the ways!
1) Lefties discovered that there *was* a difference between Bush and Gore after all.
2) Nader, as is his lifetime wont, alienated many of his most ardent supporters and staffers (quite a few of whom have cheered on my critical writing about St. Ralph).
3) There were strange conflicts and divisions within the Green Party; one of his stated purposes in 2000, few people now recall, was to make the GP a viable third party. That failed, but he vowed to continue the party-building process…. Until, well, he just kind of forgot about that, and ran for president *against* the Green Party! The man has a talent for forgetting his previous rationales.
4) As you say, I think there was a massive buyer’s remorse by people who understood that, indeed, Nader was decisive in tipping the election to Bush. It didn’t help that Ralph spent the next four years denying this with a vehemence matched only by his incoherence.

Simon Owens: How did you become an opinion editor for the Los Angeles Times? Is there any interesting story behind it?

Matt Welch: The funny thing is that I still don’t really know the answer to your question. I was perfectly happy at Reason magazine, among many other reasons because they actively encourage staffers to write for other publications. So I made the conscious effort to A) write for the Times as much as possible, and B) try to convince them, in my way, to take me on as one of their 10 regular columnists. In the process of writing a half-dozen columns, and attempting to understand the impenetrable bureaucracy on Spring Street, I met with various editors three or four times. At one of those last meetings, I finally hooked up with Andres Martinez, who had recently replaced Michael Kinsley, and with whom I share a good friend and ex-colleague, the incomparable John Allison of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (who worked on my paper in Prague). John had been chatting Andres & I up about each other for a year, but we’d always managed to miss each other … finally we met up, the conversation turned to the section, and broader ideas…. And before you know it they offered me a three-month “visiting fellowship” to sit on their editorial board. I figured I’d be open to it, even though the prospect of writing editorials full-time struck me as pretty weird, personally. Somewhere in there they asked if I’d be interested in having a full-time job on the board, and I said no. Not long after, they described a new position that didn’t yet exist, where I’d sit on the board & write editorials, but also edit the things, and also write the occasional op-ed, and also solicit & edit op-eds … and also help work on their website. Sounded kind of complicated and open-ended, so I was immediately intrigued…. And I very much liked Andres and his #2 Michael Newman, and liked the general change of direction the section had taken the previous 1-2 years … and the price was nice, so I said yes.

Not a very interesting story, I agree. I guess the coolest part for me was that it was the first time in my memory that my extended work in the obscurity of Central European English-language newspapering actually helped me. When I first returned from there, and applied for jobs everywhere (including the L.A. Times), they all just kind of shook their heads sadly, or looked at me with irritable bewilderment. But now my Prague connection finally paid off!

Simon Owens: Do you think the fact that you work as a mainstream journalist increases your legitimacy in the blogosphere?

Matt Welch: I don’t know; maybe. Though I work as a journalist, I’m not the typical member of that sub-species, largely because I spent two decades successfully avoiding typical American newsrooms. Also, even though I’m what you could call an “opinion journalist,” I take my lack of partisanship very seriously — I have never to my knowledge belonged to a political party; I try instinctively to avoid belonging to any tribe (aside from the legion of Angel fans), and one of the major themes of my writing over the years has been the distortionate, truth-bending effects of both ideology and partisanship. Some of these values overlap with classic journalism values; others are in conflict with your average newspaper employee.

I would like to think that a chunk of what modest popularity I have has to do with the more positive products of the above approach, but it’s just as likely that people were really happy I yelled obscenities at Noam Chomsky on Sept. 16, 2001.

Whatever; I’m personally not a big fan of the concept of “legitimacy.” People like you or don’t.

Simon Owens: Are there too many popular bloggers out there who just don’t have the journalistic integrity needed in order to be a good journalist?

Matt Welch: That is a fascinating question. Linguistically. Take out the word “too,” and the answer has to be “yes.” Leave it in, and it’s a definite “no,” at least for me. I’m not in the business of telling people how they should behave with their blogs.

I reckon that most popular current-events bloggers don’t want to be considered “a good journalist,” even though they might consider their work superior to the product of the evil MSM. And I also think that there is a great deal of journalistic content produced every day by people with zero formal or practical training in journalism.

These definitions are a great deal more fluid, and therefore irrelevant, than many people who fling them around seem to admit, in my experience. That said, providing links-filled commentary & ranting is just a much different exercise than sending hundreds of people out into the world to attempt (and inevitably fail) to provide an objectiv-ish and fair accounting of what important stuff happened in the world yesterday. There are some broad journalistic values that I think your popular current-events bloggers could benefit from, but that river flows two directions, if you follow me. Particular in writing style, passion, and sense of openness toward the rabble.

Simon Owens: Have you created any close relationships with politicians over the years? What are these powerful people like in real life?

Matt Welch: Mostly in Central Europe, not here, and “close” is a pretty strong word (and Central European politicians of 1990s vintage hardly resemble American politicians). Those guys were mostly dorky anti-commie liberals with kinky tastes in music and free living … but that’s also a function of the kind of people I would normally gravitate toward.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Matt Welch: Here are five blogs I enjoy very much:
Reason’s Hit & Run
Sploid (not really a blog, may go out of business soon … but great).
Emmanuelle
Doktor Frank
HalosHeaven