Rad Geek People's Daily

A fist in the air today for Feminist Blogs contributors DED Space and media girl, who had selections from their posts And the show goes on and Spam for life read on the air on national television (!), as part of the Inside the Blogs segment on CNN’s Inside Politics. Rock on.

Check it out. Other than having to hear the word blogosphere–probably the most wince-worthy neologism in the world today–pronounced aloud for the first time, I had a blast listening to it.

I don’t have a teevee these days, so I don’t get much of a chance to follow the ins and outs at CNN or Fox News. But I gather this is a short segment run on one of CNN’s daily commentary shows. Yeah, that’s only a couple of minutes a day, but it is and ought to be exciting. Tom Tomorrow was exactly right just about this time two years ago when he smacked blog-triumphalists upside the head and pointed out that the relationship of bloggers to the mainstream media is roughly that of wood tick to deer. That’s still mostly true now, but we are seeing the first creaks and whispers of a change in front of our eyes. CNN is beginning to pull material from blogs because that’s just as easy, or even easier to do than churn out more of the same commentary from the same set of blowhard usual suspects. Thus two feminist bloggers got some recognition that they deserve as much as anyone, and a lot more than the blowhard set that usually gets air time on CNN.

The more DIY media that people produce, and make freely available for re-use, the more that turning to grassroots media will become the path of least resistence. This is not about to revolutionize media; it’s unlikely to even reform it much in the immediate future. But it is a step in the right direction and it is exciting to see writing that used to exist strictly as marginalia on mainstream media discussions begin to enter, step by step, into the conversation.

Become the media.