At the risk of introducing what might seem superficial into a highly charged debate over the lack of blog coverage of the Jena Six, I'd highlight one factor that hasn't yet been discussed: political blogging's obsession with "new" content.

Chris Kromm of the Institute of Southern Studies asked on both Facing South and Daily Kos why "major progressive sites" haven't devoted much time to covering the situation in Louisiana. Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend responded by saying that bloggers either don't consider a civil rights case like Jena "their issue" or are scared away by questions of race the case ask. Matt Compton at the Daily Strategist has a useful post on how the failure to cover Jena isn't reflected across the Internet at large, especially on aggregator sites like Wikipedia and YouTube.

But there's else something fairly pedestrian at work here, I'd argue. It first occurred to me when I read this comment by a Daily Kos poster named bolgia7: "There's nothing new to report on this case except 'there's a rally going on in Jena,' which everyone knows." The facts of the Jena case have been known for months. The newest news out of Jena -- that several thousand people were getting on buses across the country on their way down to Louisiana -- was at least mentioned by many of the bigger progressive blogs. (See Kromm's post for details.)

The blogging medium is constructed to focus on the new. In fact, one of the earliest defining factors of what made a website a blog was that content was displayed chronologically, with the freshest content on top. That aspect of blogging mimics newspapers, traditionally "history's first draft," as the saying goes. Progressive political blogs have, in my opinion, done a very good job of abandoning newspapers's old "if it bleeds it leads" maxim. But perhaps because the political blogosphere was forged in the heat of the Iraq war, they have been less successful with not duplicating that medium's necessary focus on current news. And that's a shame because while on the surface blogs are built to focus on what's current, deeper down they are the most open, most flexible medium ever invented.

Here's how design/lifestyle blogger Jason Kottke expressed a similar sentiment when he returned from paternity leave:

I've saved up several links found while on leave...they'll be trickling out to the blog for the next few days. Apologies if you've seen them before (some you probably haven't), but if you've been paying attention, kottke.org isn't a place for the exclusively new and fresh. There are several other sites out there for that; they function excellently but I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with much of the blogosphere that whatever is newest is interesting to the detriment of everything else. Bollocks to the new.

Jena Six | political blogging
Nancy Scola's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati