Anyone who has read this blog for a year knows that comments hardly ever get made here. In some cases it was because I published posts and did not allow comments (and if you saw those posts you would know why).
What blogs lack in institutional vetting in most cases they can at least potentially make up for by being chronicles of events at the time those events happened. In an age in which everything on the internet was never "eternal" and could be purged and redacted rapidly one of the unintentional providential quirks of Wenatchee The Hatchet was chronicling the scope and extent of Mars Hill Church leadership purging and redacting materials as different controversial elements, statements and policies came up. But more pointedly for me, since I used to attend Mars Hill Church for years, was that I ended up documenting the "season" of chronic resignations and firings that may have made it impossible for Mars Hill public relations to spin the fact that the men who were leaving Mars Hill leadership weren't flakes or firebrands but men who had faithfully served for years with no controversy.
This early 2013 post comes to mind.
That one got 6,500 views or so since publication. If memory serves (and it may not a decade later) what probably got people's attention was breaking the news the day it was announced. Thanks to a network of sources with access to The City I got the news and ran with it the week it was announced. Eventually Team Driscoll presented the assertion that they got hacked but Wenatchee The Hatchet doesn't hack. There was at least one private meeting associates got dragged into where Mars Hill leadership expressed an interest that they get me to stop blogging about Mars Hill or give up sources. The associates, I understand, let it be known that that wasn't going to happen.
Citizen journalism has its limits but it has its values and for all their constraints (and they are considerable) blogging can fulfil citizen journalism well provided you have built trust with a network of sources and, crucially, make sure to document things for the record. In my case it was documenting things for the record before things got purged that turned out to be valuable. Alan Jacobs' points are noted but the benefit of the sheer tonnage of information published in blogs, and also sometimes in comments, is that people can cumulatively chronicle things before the people who can pull the strings on websites decide to do mass redaction or pull material completely.
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