I have finally bounced back from the travel fatigue induced by 14 hours of transit on Tuesday, returning from Paris and the Les Blogs conference. After digging out, and some reflection, I now think I learned two important things there: one from Joi Ito and another from Doc Searls.

Joi's keynote -- which dealt principally with copyright and Creative Commons (see Darren's notes here) -- sparked an important insight for me, since he touched upon the status of bloggers as artists. In a panel session, later in the day, I had the rare opportunity of getting the last word on a panel with Jason Calcanis (of Weblogsinc), Gabby Darbyshire (of Gawker Media), Julio Alonso (Weblogs SL), Christophe Labédan (The Social Media Group), and Ludovico Magnocavallo (Blogo.it). I made a distinction between the business models of Gawker and Weblogsinc, on one side, and Corante, on the other. At Corante, we view bloggers as artists, like musicians, story tellers, actors, or sculptors: people pursuing an artistic agenda. Corante's role is similar to that of a record label, or an art magazine. We compile material, publish it, and work with the artists to help them make a living from their art -- if that's what they are seeking -- but at the least we help them to reach or create an audience. Of course, artists want to retain rights to their art, to the degree that it is possible, and we have structured our agreements with contributors to make that possible. On the other hand, Gawker and Weblogsinc view their contributors as staffers in a publishing business: working for a living by writing. What is produced is not art, but content: pieces produced for the various "titles" that the companies publish. And owned by the publishers.

Note that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing: I am not suggesting it's immoral or even dangerous. It's just radically different from the perspective we have at Corante, where we see our role as promoting the newly refound art of writing, or, more generally perhaps, the arts of inquiry and commentary. Our focus remains the worlds of high technology and science, and the ways that these impact business and society. But our charge is promoting the perspectives, thoughts, and observations of a diverse network of Corante contributors.

As a result, I made the comment on the panel session that Gawker and Weblogsinc share a great deal more in common with traditional, non-blog-based media companies than with Corante, despite our common emphasis on blogs as a publishing medium. And I maintained that we believe that it is possible for a non-traditional business model like Corante's to work: we don't necessarily have to become a traditional media firm as we grow in size and reach, and as they continue to dwindle.

The second insight was the outcome of Doc's arguments (slides here) about First Ammendment protections and the metaphor that we choose to couch our discussions about blogging in. Doc warns that we should adopt the term journalism for what we do, since the First Ammendment guarantees freedom of the press, while "distribution of content" may have no such protections.

As a result, I will henceforth state that what we are doing is journalism, and that Corante is a (non-traditional) publishing company. Our blogs are really journals, published in a real-time, internet basis: but journals, nonetheless. In this view, blogging has lowered the cost of entry to publishing, allowing small fry startups like Corante to compete effectively for share-of-mind in the post-everything world of today.

Calling what we are up to "journalism" does not mean we have to accept all the dictates of the increasingly archaic and irrelevant canon of old school journalism. We are a revolution in process, reordering the rules, throwing some out, and inventing others. Still, for now on, I'm with Doc: a neo-journalist.

[tags: Les Blogs, Doc Searls, Joi Ito, events, blogging, journalism]