Glenn launched InstaPundit.com a month before 9/11, quickly becoming one of the most widely read sites in the blogosphere. An ambassador for the medium of blogging, he also regularly writes for Tech Central Station and MSNBC, and has a book debuting in March.

Glenn Reynolds — Coming full circle with his university

I went to college at the University of Tennessee, went to Yale Law School, clerked for a federal judge on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and then practiced law in Washington DC. I was with a big Wall Street firm, Dewey Ballantine, working under Joe Califano in their DC office for three years before I came back to the University of Tennessee to teach law.

Having an opportunity to teach in the town where my family lived was not something I’d expected, and I was actually really happy — I love being with my family. I teach constitutional law, national security law, and space law. I’m sort of well known for teaching second amendment law, but it’s actually a small part of what I teach. I also teach internet law, so I’m always looking for things to do on the net. I just thought I’d do a blog to do something new and different, I figured I’d learn something and maybe I’d have a couple of high quality readers if I was a lucky. It did a little better than that, though …

On his blog — after 9/11, exponential growth

I started my blog in early August of 2001. By September 10th, I had 1,600 daily visitors, and I really thought I was hitting it big. Then on September 11th, I had about triple that, then it just took off after that. And I don’t really know why! People always ask about my marketing plan, and I didn’t have one. All I did was to send links to a few people I knew who were journalists, and eventually the growth in readership was almost viral.

I blog about stuff that interests me: mostly politics — a fair amount of technology, some degree of sort of culture/media/music stuff. And whatever else I find interesting, or think isn’t getting as much attention as it deserves in the more general media. There’s a lot of stuff I tend more or less by design not to blog. I mean, I blog about war stuff, but I try to blog about stuff that gives perspective. So I tend to skip both the ‘new suicide bombing in Baghdad’ perennial story, and the ‘top aide of Zarqawi captured’ perennial story. Because in a way, those aren’t really news: they don’t really tell you anything about what’s happening. Unless there’s some reason to pay extra attention, I consider those types of stories part of the background noise.

Journalism will move away from being a profession

I think that blogging is the wave of the future, and consequently, I think we’re going to see journalism moving from a profession, back to being an activity. We used to say that a journalist was somebody who wrote a journal, and a correspondent was somebody in a distant city who wrote you letters, and corresponded. Now it means somebody with good hair and a microphone. But I think that the traditional meaning of journalism is what it’s going to be like again.

In the blogosphere, especially during breaking news events where big media has been caught flatfooted, like the Paris riots or the tsunami, you rely a lot on emails and posts from people in the area. Sometimes bloggers actually go there, like the bloggers covering the Paris riots with their digital cameras. It’s more a case of who’s on the scene and who can report — or journal — what happened, as opposed to somebody who makes a profession out of reporting and opining. So it’s driven by the activity; it’s driven by the nature of events, rather than by your paycheck, if that makes sense.

An army of Davids takes on Big Media

The book is called “An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths.” We went through this historical phase over the last 200 years, which in broad historical perspective was very much an oddity, but because we’re close to it, seems normal. The peculiar kinds of technologies we had in the past tended to empower big organizations disproportionately. The technology was such that the minimum efficient scale for doing a lot of things was pretty big.

Now we’ve sort of come out the other side of that technological shift. We’re actually seeing now that it’s often the case that a hundred bloggers can cover a story more efficiently than a hundred people working for one newspaper. And as a result, you’re seeing “an army of Davids” — lots of individuals who are empowered by technology to do things that previously could only be done by Goliaths.

On our direction

In a way, that’s what I think Pajamas Media is all about: the notion that you can do a lot of interesting journalism and opinion by aggregating a lot of individuals who were doing it on their own, as opposed to building up this big superstructure that you would do if you started a newspaper or a news service in the old-fashioned way.

I actually wrote a column in Tech Central Station several years ago, saying that if somebody can figure out a way to aggregate all of this blog content and make it easily accessible to readers, and actually make it easier for bloggers to do straight-up news coverage, as opposed to just opinion, it would probably make a lot of money. So maybe this will prove me right or wrong. Hopefully right!