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BEIJING — The unofficial end to journalism as I know it may have come earlier this week, when my Globe and Mail sporty colleague Matt Sekeres and I were at the triathlon venue in the north end of the city, waiting for the event to start.
The course is set amid the bones of the old Nine Dragons Amusement Park, built in and around the Ming Tombs Reservoir, surrounded by carefully manicured Chinese greenery. It's gorgeous, even the media lounge, which consists of tables and TV screens scattered on outdoor pavilions under thatched roofs.
The race was about an hour away when young Mr. Sekeres said the five words I have most come to dread: "I'm going to blog this." And he did - and on the 18th day of the eighth month in the year 2008, so it must be a lucky omen.
It was posted on The Globe's Games Blog at 10:23 a.m., Beijing time. Mr. Sekeres wrote three paragraphs about the excellent weather, the setting and that soon he and I would be heading down to the race course. The headline read, "Under Thatch with Blatch."
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I'm not sure if my hair burst into flames, but I wanted to burn something down.
Mr. Sekeres is a fine writer and engaging company. This isn't about him. He was merely doing what everyone - from paid professional writer to Olympian to the average guy in the stands - does now. He was committing his most idle thoughts and mundane observations if not to paper, then to its modern equivalent, a blog.
It is the modern way, but at the blogging Olympics - and these are the blogging Games, as Sydney marked the first all-out Web Games - with 20,000 journalists in the same approximate place, it is impossible to overlook the phenomenon and difficult not to participate. Let us now conjugate blog: I blog, I have blogged, I will blog.
Or rather, after a few desultory efforts in the early going here, let me say that I shall not blog. It is not because I take a principled stand against blogging. It's not that I don't love the Web. It's not that I'm a Luddite, or at least not just that I'm a Luddite.
It's that, as Michael Farber, the great Montreal sportswriter and Hockey Hall of Famer who works for Sports Illustrated, said the other day on a bus, "I have only a finite number of words in me." He is guarding what's left, properly determined not to squander them.
The Internet has completely changed the way reporters do business. That much we know.
A Canadian Press colleague saw me in a scrum the other day with my notebook out; he was stricken with nostalgia. "I can't remember the last time I used a notebook," he said. "It's all video now." Since arriving in Beijing, the workhorses of Team Globe here - the sportswriters - have filed 24/7 to the website, blogged, done "podcasts" (I did, too, but haven't a clue what it was), and, oh yes, written for the actual newspaper, which is trickier than it might seem given that the 12-hour time difference means there is usually almost no news element to the stories we write for the paper.
It's the same for everyone.
Michael Phelps's last swim, as with all swim finals thanks to NBC, took place in the morning here, prime time back home. It meant that most Canadian papers could just barely squeak into the next day's editions the news of his record eighth gold. Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star was poolside; she had five whole minutes to write and file the story. It does not make for thoughtful copy.
Ms. DiManno's work ethic is legendary. When I remarked to her colleague Doug Smith that she had written five stories one day last week, he grinned and said, "Well, the paper has five sections." On one of those multistory days, Ms. DiManno got a snarky comment about one of them on the Star website, "comments" being the remarks Web readers are encouraged to post about the stories they read.
"This feels more like a blog post, Rosie. A good blog, but a lame article," wrote someone identified only as HEC30.
You see? Everyone's a writer now. Everyone's an editor. It's as if the College of Physicians and Surgeons not only encouraged patients to read all the medical websites, but also to do their own diagnoses.
This is the democratization wrought by the Web, and if it has actually helped open up closed societies such as China's, in the West its chief effect, at least upon journalism, is to diminish whatever craft, and there is some, is left in the business.
It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone can write on deadline. It is not true that anyone can do an interview. It is not true that anyone can edit themselves and sort wheat from chaff. It is not true that even great productive writers like The Globe's Jim Christie or Ms. DiManno or Mr. Farber can hit a home run every time they sit before the laptop. But the odds of them doing it are greatly increased if they haven't already filed 1,200 words to the Web, shot a video, done a podcast and blogged ferociously all day long.
When my cohort first started out, we would get actual letters, often written in beautiful handwriting on creamy stationery. These readers went to some trouble to communicate with us, and usually we tried to write back. Then came e-mails, and though obviously they required less effort, in the early days they tended to be thoughtful, and most of us also tried to answer them. Then the volume became overwhelming, pseudonyms became common and sometimes, if you answered a note, you would learn later that your answer to one anonymous stranger had been posted somewhere, or e-mailed to 20 other people you didn't know.
And now there is blogging, and comments. Readers may take 30 seconds to post a comment on a story or blog item that a writer dashed off in a minute. On The Globe website, our slogan is "Join the Conversation," but in the blogosphere, what follows isn't usually a conversation but a brief, ungrammatical shouting match. You can have more pensive chats in a bar fight.
And journalism wasn't meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn't like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin.
Most important, Michael Farber is right. We all have a limited number of things to say, informed opinions, funny lines, quirky observations. We have only so many words in us. Do we really want to spend them on something as ephemeral as a blog?
I have written some astonishingly banal columns in my life, and some very personal ones. I am the last person in the world who should object to blogging, but I do.
The thing that I know, as all the editors I have had also know, is what I didn't get to confide or write or commit to paper, because someone else had the good sense to put on the brakes. There are no brakes, and thus there is no joy, in blogville.
