What's funny about Jeff Goldberg's post complaining that "it's one of the mysteries of the blogosphere, why more people don't simply pick up the phone once in a while," is that if he had picked up the phone and called some of these bloggers, they probably would have explained to him why they can't spend their days reporting. There's a fairly good reason why most bloggers don't spend a lot of time making calls for their blog posts: Most bloggers have day jobs. Those day jobs require them to work on other things, and so they blog at night, or over their lunch hour, or in moments stolen from the workday. What they can't do is ask their colleagues in the surrounding cubicles to shush while they have long and loud talks about their private hobby. Conversely, as blogging professionalizes, and as more folks are paid to do it full or part time, you get more bloggers who report. I make a lot of calls. Many of them end up on this site, either in the form of direct quotes or background information. My work pays for me to have a phone line from which I can make these calls, and my colleagues understand that it's part of their job to endure me talking about insurance regulations all day. But that's not because I have the magic "call people" gene, it's because I'm a professional writer. Similarly, Dana Goldstein, Marc Ambinder, Chris Cilizza, and a variety of other professional writer/bloggers make lots of calls. If their day jobs were at accounting firms, however, they'd probably make fewer calls. This is one of those things that irritates me about professional writers complaining that those damn bloggers just don't do enough: Being a professional writer is an immensely privileged position. If you've got the gig, then pat yourself on the back, shut up, outcompete your competition, and be generous to those who steal time out of their workday in order to carve out a small space in the national conversation. This is time, after all, that you could spend making calls.
