Let’s say many weblogs are authored by people with strong views, committed, happily biased. Let’s say many bloggers break rules and conventions. And let’s say they thoroughly enjoy that new tool of expression they now have at their disposal. Then let’s see if that description might also fit a man like Matthias Conrad Peterson. In 1795, Peterson took over as editor of Kongelig Allene Privileg. Throndhiems Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger, or Adressa (Adresseavisen), as it is now known. The newspaper owners probably didn’t know about Mr. Peterson’s radical republican ideas when they hired him. But they soon found out, because he immediately started filling the newspaper with highly controversial commentaries, articles and news, according to my source here, media professor Svennik Høyer’s book “Pressen”. “Peterson lunges out against all the world’s kings and princes, and he applauds the execution of Louis 16th. He agitates for the freedom of the press and against the death penalty – but not against executions of French kings”, writes Høyer. Later Peterson started Norway’s first political journal, Qvartbladet, where he fervently attacked despotism, the aristocracy and the clergy. His favourite cause was freedom of speech. Høyer quotes him in original, and I risk a translation:

“The Despot can for a moment halt the exercise of this Right, but he is far too powerless to obliterate it, for its origin is God himself”.

Trondheim’s establishment was naturally often provoked by this untiring publicist, but he was allowed to carry on for several years, though one article, where he described an Englishman’s sensual pleasure of brushing a woman’s hair, was mildly criticized by Adresseavisen’s owners.

The wild men of the early phase of Norwegian journalism, wouldn’t they be bloggers today? Later, in the 1830s, the oppositional paper Statsborgeren spread fear among the mighty civil servants in pre-parlamentarian Norway. The editor Peder Pedersen Soelvold reveled in stories about the bureaucrats’ fraud, embezzlement and infringement. Soelvold was known to be arrogant, difficult and generally a troublemaker. A pain in the ass, no doubt.

So there are historic parallels and maybe lessons, as William Powers explores (sub.req.) in the US context in The Atlantic. A few decades after the likes of Peterson and Soelvold, started the era of professionalization that ended – culminated? – in the highly specialized media organizations of the late 20th century. Now, as Powers notes, “the disaggregation of the old mass audience has taken on a furious momentum”:

“For two centuries before the arrival of television America had a wild, cacophonous, emphatically decentralized media culture that mirrored society itself. And something like that media culture seems to be returning right now.”

Disaggregation is painful. Deprofessionalization isn’t unproblematic. That we have had some fierce bloggers vs. journalists debates, is no surprise. Are they over already? That looks a little premature, though I agree that there might be more interesting issues to discuss. Such as the question of voice, of allowing really individual voices in established media, of changing perceptions of credibility. Many more.

There will be a lot of debates – entertaining and enlightening, meaningless and misleading. Not boring. New Peterson’s and Soelvold’s – there are plenty of them waiting in the wings.