BusinessTN

Last April, a Canadian court heard testimony alleging that top members of that country’s then ruling party were involved in money laundering and bribery. John Gomery, the magistrate in the case, issued some strict ground rules before testimony began. Journalists would be allowed to attend the hearings, Gomery decided, but would be gagged from actually reporting any of the details.

Once the hearings got underway, an eyewitness began supplying Minneapolis, Minn., call center manager Edward Morrissey with reports from inside the courtroom. Well-positioned outside Canada and Gomery’s jurisdictional reach, Morrissey posted those reports on his blog, Captain’s Quarters.” In just a few postings, one man’s hobby had rendered big media like The Toronto Sun toothless and attracted to his blog hundreds of thousands of page views per day from interested Canadian voters. The result? Gomery summarily lifted his restriction.

Morrissey’s case illustrates how technology has rendered everyone a potential publisher, and by extension a policy maker. The medium of the Web diary, or blog, allows average citizens to usurp the monopoly over news delivery held by the mainstream media. Freedom of the press has become a participatory activity—no longer just a spectator sport. Legendary journalist A.J. Liebling’s statement that freedom of the press belongs to whomever owns one holds true in an age of blogging.

“Blogs are hell on gatekeepers,” says internationally acclaimed Tennessee blogger Glenn Reynolds. Reynolds’ blog, Instapundit, was one of the world’s first blogs and remains one of its most popular. According to Advertising Age, there are over 20 million blogs, a number that has doubled every five months for the past three years. (At that pace, there will be a blog for each of the 6.7 billion people on earth by April 2009.) The general populace obviously likes the free-form commentary of the emerging Web format: U.S. workers spent the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs during 2005. One in four visits blogs and on average spends 3.5 hours, or 9% of the work week, reading them.

Though it might be tempting to view blogging as something new, it would be a mistake to be distracted by the technological trappings. One needs look no further than an American history textbook for its direct antecedent—the pamphlet. Historian Bernard Bailyn, who chronicled the impact of pamphleteering in advancing the American Revolution, once described the pamphlet as having “peculiar virtues” as a medium of communication that allowed writers “to do things that were not possible in any other form.” Author George Orwell’s description of the pamphlet as “a one-man show” offering the freedom “to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious,” or, on the other hand, “to be more detailed, serious and high-brow than is ever possible in a newspaper” sounds much like the part-praise, part-criticism often directed at blogs.

But judging blogs merely on their ability to one-up mainstream journalism misses the point. Bloggers don’t think in terms of Pulitzers or circulation counts. Reynolds says those who seek out a blogger’s “homerun” moments miscalculate the manner in which a blog is truly influential. Ultimately, he says, the best way to measure a blog is not by leaps and bounds but by increments, by the constant hum of its steady presence. By providing day-to-day exposure to opinions, facts and context, and by accepting and publishing feedback, the blog becomes something greater than much of what is offered in mainstream media. After all, a newspaper column is a lecture; a blog is a conversation. Online blogging communities—comprised of the blogger, his or her readership and the news of the day (usually supplied by mainstream media)—continuously feed off each other.

That’s not to say some of the measurements used by mainstream media to gauge influence don’t apply to bloggers. A blog entry has often been the first pebble that started an avalanche. The blogosphere’s rate of breaking news stories and accruing page views can be impressive. Mainstream media outlets are increasingly imitating blogs, even hiring on-staff bloggers, a fact that clearly speaks to their influence. Attacks on blogs and bloggers, more and more prevalent among lawmakers in Tennessee and elsewhere, also bear out the effect.

Bloggers have become an influential presence in a system still seeking to establish a new equilibrium. Self-appointed media watchdogs, they often get traction on issues that traditional journalists don’t. At the vanguard of public reaction to the news of the day, blogs are read devotedly by top executives and average Joe’s alike. They’re here to stay.

Given that blogs aren’t going anywhere, and that Tennessee has a particularly rich supply of them, it’s high time more traditional outlets provided a serious examination of the medium. With that in mind, Business Tennessee presents a first-ever look at some of the individuals influencing readers throughout the state and beyond.

’Pundit Power

Glenn Reynolds may not have invented the Internet, but there’s good reason why many of his peers call him simply “the Blogfather.”

In the world of blogs, Knoxvillian and University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a. Instapundit, is a rock star. One of the founding fathers of the blogosphere, whose site attracts on average over 160,000 visitors daily, Reynolds has been described as the modern day media equivalent of legendary American political commentator and New Republic magazine founder, Walter Lippman. But to buy into such a highbrow comparison, it is perhaps necessary to first offer a few caveats about Reynolds. He is an openly adoring fan of the music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. He’s been known to play in a rock band himself. And he has never in his life had either a journalism course or a Washington, D.C., power lunch.

What Reynolds does have is a worldwide following. A quick sampling of Reynolds’ online readership reveals a Major in the U.S. Army serving in Afghanistan, a news junkie in Laos and a gaggle of White House staffers. It’s ironic, then, that virtually nobody recognizes Reynolds on the streets of Knoxville, or the nation’s capitol. So just who is Glenn Reynolds?

A self-described “academic brat” whose childhood passions included reading encyclopedias, Reynolds moved around a lot as a kid. His family finally settled in Maryville, where Reynolds attended high school while his father served in a top administrative post at the nearby University of Tennessee. Reynolds would eventually wind up at Yale University’s law school, followed by a stint in Nashville clerking for U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Gilbert S. Merritt. Merritt remembers Reynolds as “a very interesting clerk” who was “certainly a little out of the ordinary” both in his libertarian-leaning views and his unusually high IQ.

“Glenn has a tremendous amount of curiosity about things,” Merritt says. “And he knows so much about everything.”

Mentored by Merritt, Reynolds would spend the next few years practicing law inside the Beltway. He then returned to Tennessee in a professorial role at U.T.-Knoxville, where he continued to build a name for himself in the field of Internet Law (and ran a few Web sites on the side). Even in those pre-blog days, Reynolds was already writing op-ed pieces for large circulation American newspapers and appearing on cable television programs, including Larry King Live, The O’Reilly Factor and PBS NewsHour. He has even published a few books.

“Some of the histories people have written about blogging make it sound like I put down the plow and picked up the laptop when I started to blog—and that’s not really true,” Reynolds says. “It’s not like I’d never been invited to play with the big kids before.” Reynolds’ star has shone brighter, however, since the establishment of his blog. Instapundit.com is considered to be the most read news blog on Earth. For perspective, consider that Instapundit receives more daily traffic than the Web site of any single mainstream newspaper in Tennessee. Because of his online popularity, Reynolds’ TV appearances have spiked, as have invitations to pen commentary pieces for such mainstream media stalwarts as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And then there’s his forthcoming book. But more on that later.

Reynolds’ blogging began innocently enough when he began e-mailing friends and colleagues links to articles he found on the Web that interested him. “It was like a personalized news service,” Reynolds quips. “Some of my colleagues miss those days.” Once Reynolds formalized his daily linking and commentary with the establishment of his blog, readership grew organically. According to Reynolds, that’s the nature of the blogosphere. “I point to something I think is interesting, and perhaps comment on it,” Reynolds explains. “People who are interested in what you’re interested in will agree. Others will go find some other blog.”

On Sept. 10, 2001, Instapundit was drawing 1,600 page views. Still called a “me-zine,” the site focused on Reynolds-inspired topics like greed in the music industry and the importance of stem cell research. Then came 9/11. Times were such that people perhaps felt it was important to share their opinions, Reynolds says. And people dissatisfied with mainstream media coverage turned to blogs as an alternative. Links to various sites began to circulate. Overnight the blogosphere took flight in the American consciousness. Instapundit soared highest.

The ensuing debate over America’s decision to go to war captivated both a nation and the blogosphere. Instapundit became a key fulcrum in vetting the arguments both for and against the war, doing a far better job than most newspapers. Pro-war in bent, Reynolds became one of America’s leading “war bloggers,” described by National Public Radio (NPR) host and former New York Times journalist Christopher Lydon as “the heart and mind of the Bush administration” regarding the push for war. Instapundit readership at the time topped 220,000 daily. As Lydon summarized, the war discourse on Instapundit made it “perhaps the first inescapable and indispensable blog—certainly the model of robust, wide-open electronic axe-grinding at the center of a long political storm.” (Judge Merritt, a lifelong Democrat who supplied Reynolds with information while in Iraq in 2003 helping to erect its new judicial system, disputes Lydon’s characterization: “I never found Glenn to have any axes to grind. He does not have an unseen agenda.”)

If the Sept. 11 terrorist attack catapulted Reynolds’ blog into the stratosphere, the war against terrorism has provided ample fuel to maintain its altitude. Reynolds now has a global source network that supplies him with news and tips that maintain him as a journalistic force. What’s next for this pioneer of the medium? Or does Reynolds, now one of America’s most respected commentators, even need a “next?” Probably not.

Regardless, more traditional success in the world of publishing likely awaits. His forthcoming book, An Army of Davids, about “how markets and technology empower ordinary people to beat big media, big government and other Goliaths,” is due out in early March, and could vault Reynolds onto a bestseller’s list. Reynolds’ publisher, Nashville-based Nelson Current, no doubt relished the thought of Reynolds’ built-in fan base stemming from Instapundit in signing the writer to a deal. An Army of Davids is Reynolds’ first book since creating his blog.

As such, Reynolds may be on the verge of showing other bloggers how to turn what for most is an unpaid hobby (not the case for Reynolds) into a paying profession. It’s easy. Just set up a Web site and start voicing your opinion. If you’re good, and people notice you, a major publisher may someday come knocking with an advance aimed at convincing you to write a book.

All it takes for “overnight” success are years of hourly nurturing a devoted fan base, one small thoughtful post after another.

Secondary Orbits

They may not yet exert the pull of Instapundit, but a number of Tennessee bloggers are increasingly visible in the state’s blogosphere

Bill Hobbs

www.billhobbs.com

Hobbs has the largest blog readership in the state political sphere. Deft at bringing simplicity out of complexity, he’s also been doing it longer than just about anyone. His work has been known to draw the ire of top lawmakers in Tennessee.

Hobbs has repeatedly pointed up bills moving through the legislature that even Capitol Hill staffers whose job it is to track legislation have learned about first on his blog. That’s an impressive feat given that Hobbs employs relatively few Capitol Hill sources.

Hobbs originally championed the idea of a taxpayer bill of rights for Tennessee, a set of constitutional provisions to limit revenue growth for state government and to require that voters approve any tax increase. That TABOR is even an issue in the General Assembly is due in no small part to Hobbs.

Most Tennessee lawmakers rue the inevitable day bloggers take their place alongside mainstream journalists on Capitol Hill. Hobbs is working to hasten that day by organizing Tennessee political bloggers for a surprise day of blanketing the legislature with wall-to-wall coverage on blogs sometime during the current legislative session.

A trained journalist who once was a frequent contributor to a predecessor magazine to Business Tennessee, Hobbs now directs Belmont University’s news bureau.

Donald Sensing

One Hand Clapping

www.donaldsensing.com

Sensing has a large readership (roughly 3,000 to 4,000 daily) and primarily covers faith issues and war. His focus is understandable given that Sensing is a retired Army officer turned full-time United Methodist minister whose son is now serving in the Marine Corps in one of the more violent parts of Iraq. As one fellow Tennessee blogger says, “Anyone who wants a primer on warfare followed by a beautiful sermon will leave Sensing’s place satisfied.”

A former speechwriter and public affairs officer for the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon, Sensing is arguably the best writer a Web surfer will ever encounter on a blog. While most blogs tend to read like stream of consciousness rants, Sensing’s posts are lengthy and well reasoned. Mainstream media recognizes his talents. Sensing now routinely writes op-ed pieces for elite American newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal.

Bob Krumm

www.BobKrumm.com

Krumm’s blog is on a meteoric rise. A Republican, a West Point and Vanderbilt graduate, and a former Army major turned engineer and builder, Krumm’s bailiwick is ethics in state government. Krumm admits his biases, and as such his posts never reek of partisanship. For the most part, he’s even-handed in his criticisms of Republicans and Democrats alike.

Krumm recently posted a position that if Democrats want to win the 2008 presidential election, they should get behind the war effort full bore. Krumm’s thinking is that if Democrats are savvy enough not to allow daylight between themselves and the GOP on foreign policy, the poor domestic record of Republicans would lead to their demise. Reynolds and Mickey Kaus (considered by Reynolds the true founder of the political blogosphere) each linked to the story on their respective sites.

Krumm could become the first Tennessee political blogger to parlay his online popularity into elective office. Krumm recently announced his intention to run against long serving Belle Meade Democratic state Senator Doug Henry in 2006. As Krumm stated on his blog, his candidacy will test whether someone whose “unguarded thoughts and beliefs are on display for the world to see” can actually run and win a race in today’s cautious political atmosphere filled with “say-nothing politicians.”

Jeff Cornwall

The Entrepreneurial Mind

http://forum.belmont.edu/cornwall

Co-founder of a 300-employee behavioral health care company in North Carolina, Cornwall is now a business professor at Belmont University and director of the university’s Center for Entrepreneurship.

His blog was recently chosen by Forbes magazine as one of its seven favorite entrepreneurship and small business blogs. (The New York Times also put Cornwall on its list of favorites.)

After reading his work, it’s not hard to see why. Cornwall covers everything a person needs to know about starting and running a business, including a great deal about the intangibles that make small businesspeople successful. Anyone who starts or runs a small business without making Cornwall daily reading does so at his or her own peril.

The Entrepreneurial Mind is further evidence of the influence of Hobbs, who launched Cornwall, a bona fide “non-techie,” into cyberspace. Cornwall’s blog, which attracts readers from around the world, has resulted in favorable attention for Belmont and for his program, the fastest-growing major on campus.

Michael Silence

No Silence Here

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/knx/silence

Brittney Gilbert

Nashville Is Talking

www.nashvilleistalking.com

Silence and Gilbert get lumped together because they are each on the new frontier of bloggers employed by mainstream media (MSM) outlets. That similarity aside, the two bloggers are very different. Silence is decidedly non-partisan and specializes in covering stories that The Knoxville News-Sentinel can’t (or won’t). He also gets stories out on behalf of the paper before it’s published. To its credit, the News-Sentinel was the first Tennessee news media with an in-house journalist to operate a blog.

Gilbert blogs for TV station WKRN News Channel 2. She has a good-sized readership at her blog, which aggregates all blogs in Middle Tennessee and mingles in Nashville-area news and gossip. Ads for her blog have appeared on Monday Night Football, exposure that’s tough to beat, and a big reason why fellow bloggers cherish a link from her.

Gilbert’s site has occasionally served as a whipping post for Republicans, a fact that has enflamed the tempers of some of the state’s conservative bloggers, who feel MSM bloggers should (like Silence) remain politically neutral. It’s perhaps a signal of what’s to come as MSM further embraces blogs—more balance in a medium that to date, like talk radio, is largely a bastion of conservative ideology.

Corporate Blogs

Not all bloggers are political pundits or tech geeks. Increasingly, corporate America is embracing the blog format as a personal and professional tool.

Laid up last year with a broken ankle, Nashville-based Michael Hyatt, a former literary agent turned CEO of the world’s largest Christian book publisher, publicly traded Thomas Nelson, began a blog entitled Working Smart (http://michaelhyatt.blogs.com/workingsmart). One of the highest ranking executive bloggers in America, Hyatt writes predominantly about technology, including a recent focus on the future of digital book publishing.

Hyatt is also an example of the growing number of corporate types embracing blogs as an efficient way to manage and communicate with employees. Hyatt’s company blog is open for input from both the 600 employees he oversees and the public at large. It’s a rare and interesting glance inside a large company’s inner workings.

MicroBlogs

So-called “microblogs” are temporary blogs usually only of interest to a well-defined group of people. They operate like a closed mailing list. Examples include: Donald Sensing’s microblog (www.wcscalendar.com), which served as a clearinghouse on all things related to the now-defeated Williamson County Schools’ “balanced” calendar proposal.

http://whatisreallygoingoninnolensvilletn.blogspot.com, a microblog specifically catering to residents of Nolensville just south of Nashville. Nolensville is a small rural community on the precipice of tremendous residential and commercial growth. The blog details recent town hall meetings and updates area development projects steadily altering the character of the idyllic community, all done courtesy of the site’s unnamed (and sometimes saucy) moderator.

Blogs by Politicians

Gov. Phil Bredesen deserves kudos for his pioneer status among U.S. governors in the establishment of a blog, Phil Blog (www.tennessee.gov/governor/viewBlog.do#b2). That said, the oft-neglected blog is disappointingly not used to pontificate on pressing state issues but rather to detail Bredesen’s personal experience as governor. (Bredesen recently related the story of enduring a 5.1 earthquake while on an upper floor of a high-rise hotel on a visit to Japan. “We also have a typhoon moving slowly this way,” Bredesen blogged, “but no frogs or locusts yet.”) Perennial gubernatorial candidate John Jay Hooker’s blog (http://johnjayhooker.net/blog) is devoted entirely to his crusade for meaningful campaign reform in American politics. Hooker is a born blogger who has clearly found his medium. It’s a shame the legendary orator doesn’t utilize his acre of cyberspace as a virtual campaign stump to scrub Gov. Bredesen’s record in office.The blog of State Sen. Roy Herron (D-Dresden) (http://royherron.blogspot.com), an ordained Methodist minister, author of the recent book How Can a Christian be in Politics? and one of the legislature’s most eloquent and moving speakers, is not surprisingly quite well written. But Herron’s blog suffers from the same problem that plagues Bredesen’s—a tendency to steer clear of sticky issues or viewpoints, avoidance that renders the site too safe to be truly interesting.

Better things can be said about Knoxville state Representative Stacy Campfield’s blog Camp4u (http://lastcar.blogspot.com). Though highly partisan in tone, the Republican Campfield’s blog is unapologetically in his personal voice. He doesn’t shy away from controversy, and he provides—at least to the degree he can as a member of the minority party in the House—a view behind the curtain on Capitol Hill.

Campfield may be the best example in Tennessee of the way blogs flatten hierarchies. A junior member of the legislature without any clout to speak of in Democratic House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh’s chamber, Campfield’s blogging has enabled him to shake things up in the legislature in a way he never could have done had he gone through ordinary channels.

Anyone who doubts the upside potential of a blogging politician need only consider the story of former State Sen. Marsha Blackburn (now U.S. Rep. Blackburn), who via an e-mail from the Senate floor in 2002 purportedly set in motion the horn-honking protests that many believe quelled legislative attempts to pass a state income tax.

In Memoriam

Randy Neal, a bank software designer in Blount County, was once Tennessee’s most famous liberal blogger, known and respected across the national blogosphere. The author behind “SouthKnoxBubba,” Neal was also anonymous, a decision he made for fear his blog’s liberal views might damage his ability to earn a living in conservative East Tennessee.

It all came crashing down last June when Neal “outed” himself on his site and summarily shut down his blog. Following the posting of some reader comments on his blog disparaging an article published in Knoxville’s alternative weekly newspaper, the Metro Pulse, Neal received an e-mail from Pulse publisher Brian Conley stating that if Conley wanted to “manipulate” Neal, he would “threaten to run a cover story on bank software designers and the blogs they create.” Neal promptly posted Conley’s e-mail on his Web site, revealed his identity and didn’t post again. Conley later apologized for the e-mail.

Beyond his blog’s past status as a liberal oasis, Neal’s legacy in the Tennessee blogosphere is also secure for the fact that he founded “Rocky Top Brigade,” Tennessee’s association of blogs—the only statewide association of bloggers in America.

SouthKnoxBubba’s trademark wit and wisdom is not lost to the blogosphere. Neal recently launched Knoxviews, a group blog where he publishes under his own name.

Fans of Neal’s work can now also find it periodically published on Durham, North Carolina-based blog Facing South, described as a “blog for progressive Southerners.”