In todays Irish Times – printed here in full in case you don’t subscribe…services to the blogosphere and all that (ok so I’m not Aine and don’t deserve it…)
A funny shade of green

Belinda McKeon

From Enda Kenny’s hairdo to Bebo’s ‘ledges’, Blogorrah revels in constructive begrudgery, the website creators tell Belinda McKeon .

‘It’s too bitchy.” “It’s not bitchy enough.” “It’s completely up its own arse.” “It isn’t as good as it used to be.” “It’s shite.” Pardon the French, but there’s not much escaping it on Blogorrah.com, the satirical website with a gimlet eye for the faces, follies and farces of contemporary Ireland.

These poor impressions were the first thing to greet visitors to Blogorrah on its first day online, and they set the site’s tone – wincingly sharp and wisecrackingly irreverent – as well as anything could. After all, it was Derek O’Connor, the site’s “editor emeritus”, who penned them as a handy guide to grousing for those cybercritics inevitably waiting in the wings to take the newcomer down a few pegs.

“Blogorrah – Not Half As Good As It Used To Be” blared the site’s first post, alongside a still from the just-leaked Colin Farrell sex tape. With headlines such as “Samuel Beckett – Party Animal?” and “Funking Up the Angelus” to follow during that first week, alongside musings on a newspaper editor’s (alleged) thong, a television presenter’s (alleged) style meltdown and a former taoiseach’s (actual, as it turned out) demise, things went steadily downhill from there.

The site’s readership figures, meanwhile, went steadily in the other direction; from only a handful of visitors in the early weeks, Blogorrah has seen its audience expand to more than 30,000 readers a week.

Of course, if those readers would let O’Connor and his publisher, John Ryan, away with talking in terms of hits rather than visitors, the figures would sound even more impressive; Blogorrah, which serves a daily diet of pop culture, politics, social commentary and arts and media coverage – all refracted through a glinting lens of mischief – reached its fivemillionth page hit in November.

Clearly, there’s an audience out there for the features the site has made its own: spiky summations both of Irish news stories and of media coverage of those stories; Irish-related celebrity gossip; gleeful delves into the bizarre photo albums and even more bizarre vocabulary of the generation of Irish teenagers and twentysomething “ledges” who host public profiles on the networking website Bebo.com; art and music videos; nostalgic, cringe-inducing or comedic footage with an Irish link, sampled from the bottomless pit that is the video-sharing website youtube.com, and PR shots of Irish models so cheesy that they are apparently being enjoyed in New York PR and advertising agencies as masterpieces of the European avant-garde.

But, as commenters to the site quickly chided O’Connor and Ryan when the figures got out, hits are too vague to count for anything; talk of unique visitors, or don’t talk at all. In other words, don’t get above your station. That’s the kind of no-nonsense commenter Blogorrah attracts. They’re the type of commenter, too, who waste no time subjecting Ryan to a ruthless ribbing over his past as a self-crafted dandy-about-Dublin and originator of lurid celebrity publications including VIP and the ill-fated Stars on Sunday.

Naturally, they have his present as a self-crafted man-about-Manhattan and publisher of two hugely successful glossy magazines about dogs (there’s no upmarket US niche market quite like the canine) to account for as well, but they do that admirably. That is, they do it with gleeful, delicious begrudgery. But there’s nothing wrong with a dose of begrudgery, says O’Connor.

“I’ve always been a very big fan of what I like to think of as constructive begrudgery,” he says. Which is what? “Which is saying, this is shite, but here’s why it’s shite, or I’ll at least be funny about it. I think we have all these great commenters now, who are often funnier than we are, than what we write ourselves.”

The “we” refers to O’Connor himself, who co-owns the site and writes most of the 10 to 12 entries daily, as well as to John Ryan, who writes occasional items (more “ethereal and surreal” to O’Connor’s “Dub, sock-it-to-ya” style, he says), and to the site’s younger editor, Larry Ryan, no relation to the publisher, who moved to New York from Dublin, where he had been a writer for another bible of Irish satire, Mongrel magazine.

Blogorrah was born when O’Connor, a journalist and scriptwriter who moved to New York in 2005, got talking with Ryan about the idea for a website which would apply the techniques of the popular Manhattan media site gawker.com to Ireland, without being limited to media-centred sniping: “a one-stop Irish pop culture shop,” as O’Connor puts it, “something that had all the bits and pieces of news floating around. We’re both news junkies, and being in New York you don’t hear a lot of stuff from home. So we thought, wouldn’t it be great to do something that filled in those gaps, that offered the context.”

The revelation – although it was never something the site attempted to hide – that Blogorrah was a New York-based site caused a huffy consternation among some bloggers last month; a virtual cottage industry in conspiracy theories did business for a time, fuelled by vague opinions about tax scams, legal loopholes, and the failed screenwriting career of O’Connor. “What’s wrong with blogging about Ireland in Ireland?” demanded one commenter. “It’s like someone in Dublin running a Manhattan blog. Stupid.” Does he have a point? “I think it’s probably easier to do a site like this from here,” says O’Connor, “because it blocks out a lot of the white noise. If you were doing it in Ireland, to some degree, you’d be more overwhelmed.”

Besides, he says, the site’s original aim was to provide Irish news and commentary to an Irish audience outside of Ireland – those living or spending periods abroad. The interest from, and the connection with Ireland itself, he says, genuinely came as a surprise. It has its consequences, not least having to publish material at 3am so that the Irish reader turning on their computer at 8am will have something to read.

The daily audience in Ireland is “huge and very vociferous and very responsive and very immediate,” he says, and if that audience feels that Blogorrah isn’t doing something well enough, fast enough or thoroughly enough, it will let Blogorrah know.

Something about which some commenters both inside and outside of Ireland were very vocally disgruntled was Blogorrah’s policy of refusing to print some comments posted in response to items on the site. The site explicitly states that comments of a racist, homophobic or sexist nature will not be printed. But comments which fall into a greyer area are also subject to deletion. Particularly in response to the cheesy PR shots of Irish models and television personalities, and to photographs from Bebo pages, comments can be on the malicious side. The anonymity of the commenting system can compound this issue.

“In some cases you know for a fact that it’s one person under different names, just posting nasty, nasty stuff,” says O’Connor. “The veil of anonymity can bring out the worst in people. A lot of the comments to the modelling pictures, for example, are very disparaging personally. ‘Look at her fat arse’, and so on. And again, maybe this is where the name is deceptive in a way. We’re a publication, not a blog.”

Which means, he says, that Blogorrah won’t publish personally offensive, or libellous material about anybody. “Some people said, just let it run, let the comments go in, and it’ll sort itself out. But then you just end up with a lot of unreadable belligerence.”

It’s true that libel is a worry for a site like Blogorrah. But it’s also true that the site’s location in New York shields it somewhat from libel worries, given how liberal American libel law is compared to Irish defamation law. Solicitor Paula Mullooly, a partner in Simon McAleese solicitors and a member of the Legal Advisory Group on Defamation, says satire, particularly of “public” figures, would be given “much more significant leeway [ in America] than in this jurisdiction”.

American law does not hold a website responsible for the comments posted by its users, Mullooly points out, and while an Irish person could sue a site such as Blogorrah for defamation, they would need a judgment from an Irish court first, and a US court would be unlikely to enforce such a judgment in its own jurisdiction.

Irish-based satire blogs might need, then, to step more carefully through the legal minefield, but some of them show few signs of being unsteady on their feet. Individual writers such as Twenty Major and the Swearing Lady unleash inspired streams of vitriol at the idiocies and excesses of Irish society on a daily basis. The group endeavour Tuppenceworth.ie recently carried out a brilliant, intricate dissection of every newspaper published in Ireland, of media biases and laziness, as witty as it was discomfiting.

With names such as Langerland, Skangerland, Snackbox Diaries and Nobnation, the websites of animators and video artists who parody and pillory politicians and celebrities are clearly not residents of polite society. But Blogorrah has become a point of confluence for the satirists, some of whom contribute to it editorially as well as in the comments section.

“I think there’s this incredible energy in the Irish blogosphere,” says O’Connor. “All of these people are publishing for free, apropos of nothing.” And it’s in the context of the upcoming general election, O’Connor believes, that the blogosphere will come into its own in Ireland, as it has done in the US.

“I think that it’s going to be a blogging election. The Irish electoral process has never been held up to the scrutiny that blogs allow for.”

Just as US sites did in the run-up to the mid-term elections last year, Blogorrah has become a forum for the dissemination and consideration of the materials and the mechanisms which make up electoral campaigns: the photo-shoots, the campaign videos, the interview tapes which candidates might prefer to forget.

Faced with the rapid-fire coverage (not to mention the ever-expanding circulation) of which blogs are capable, traditional media outlets can be “defensive”, he says.

“Blogs aren’t perfect by any stretch, but what they have going for them is an immediacy. And a back-and-forth response, and an elasticity that the print media doesn’t have. I think part of the negativity is a reaction to the fact that they’re losing a generation. There’s a generation that just aren’t going to read the papers, and I think there’s a tangible frustration in that. But it’s time for the print media to play catch-up.”

In the blogosphere, it seems, information moves at a breakneck speed. And don’t we in the print media know it.

“It’s too late for The Irish Times to pick up on Blogorrah, you know,” O’Connor grins. “Blogorrah’s over. It’s just not as good as it used to be. I mean, when Ryan Tubridy said he liked it . . .”

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Gawker The gossip king Gawker ( www.gawker.com ) – of which Blogorrah happily admits to being a “cheap and tawdry rip-off” – is a satirical website with a focus on the cut-throat, ego-soaked worlds of the Manhattan media, art, literature and fashion scenes.

Established in 2003 with postings on real estate, the Vogue canteen, and the vanities of the Hamptons, it was intended as an online frown-and-chuckle stop for the city’s media and financial elite.

But the introduction of Gawker Stalker – a celebrity sightings round-up with an appetite for the embarrassing and the inane – turned the site into an altogether different beast, and a vastly more successful one in commercial terms.

The Conde Nast exposés, the sneering at NY Fashion Week, and the “book hot/real hot” debates (on the misleading attractiveness of author photographs) remain, but they couldn’t exist without the Stalker and the advertising revenues it has secured.

www.defamer.com is the Hollywood sibling of Gawker; Mollygood and Go Fug Yourself are two of its wittier cousins.

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Speaking their minds, Satire in the blogosphere Twenty Major ( www.twentymajor.blogspot.com ) Winner of practically every award worth winning at the inaugural Irish Blog Awards last year, this Dublin-based blogger gives daily hell to the considerable ills and idiocies of the Ireland he observes. Often tasteless, always articulate, usually brilliant. Pity about the merry band of wannabes trailing in his wake.

The Swearing Lady ( www.arseendofireland.blogspot.com ) Straight-talking and savagely witty, the Swearing Lady is a young mother living in a Galway council estate who knows what it’s like to be “young, intelligent and stuck in the arse end of Ireland”. Every day, she takes the Celtic Tiger by the scruff (Ireland, “where shoes are more important than feet”) and gives it a sound kicking in prose that sears.

Slugger O’Toole and TuppenceWorth (www.sluggerotoole.com and www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog) Slugger O’Toole is not satire as such, but since it’s a blog on Northern Irish politics and culture, it sometimes looks that way; in the hands of researcher and political analyst Mick Fealty, who updates several times daily on breaking news and behind-the-news stories, truth is often shown to be odder than fiction. The same thing goes for TuppenceWorth’s paper round project, which subjects every Irish newspaper to a ruthlessly close reading and charts the proportion of actual journalism to spin, advertorial, unsupported bluster and sheer nonsense, with unsettling results.

Snackbox Diaries ( www.blather.net/snackboxdiaries ) If it’s in the news, it has probably already been photoshopped or video-spoofed to within an inch of its life by Nat King Coleslaw. Album covers, television ads, billboard campaigns, nothing is safe from the snackbox. Out of Twink’s furious phone message to her ex-husband, he created a mock computer programme which has to be seen to be believed. Let’s just say that Microsoft’s “It looks like you’re writing a letter” pop-up icon will never look the same again.