Media

The year of the Romanian blog

By: Cristian Lupsa

Is 2006 the year of the Romanian blog? Some bloggers give their opinions

Posted: 12/03/2006

Andreea Retea

One night in late January, Andreea Retea announced to the world she was a cyclophobe, a person scared of bicycles. That Sunday night was the same evening she confessed to drinking too much beer, lusting for Adrien Brody and having irritable skin. It was the same night she said to hell with all of them – all those unknown men harassing her. It was the same night she embraced her celebrity and decided to keep blogging.

Retea, a second-year journalism student at the University of Bucharest, has been blogging as Andressa since November and there aren’t many web-addicts in Romania or associated with Romania who have not read her postings. She brings in more than 115 visitors daily – a decent count in blogland.

“I wouldn’t know why they read me, but I’d like to think that they come back because I don’t give them links, or funny pictures they could find on their own, but I give them text with a certain depth,” Retea says. “I would say that it’s my writing style that makes me different. Because I’m not boring, and because I aim to provoke, to raise questions.”

Style is not the only thing to which Retea owes her fame. Being a woman in a male-dominated blogging world is also important. But no less important is the timing of her joining the online publishing community also referred to as the “blogosphere.”

Retea’s blog took off in what could become the “year of the blog” in Romania – a year when the form could mature, consolidate its popularity and perhaps become an acceptable reference in media, culture or even politics. It’s happened in other countries and the indication is that it could happen here too. Several estimates put the current number of Romanian blogs at around 10,000, a figure that has steadily grown by 100 per cent every six months, according to Carmen Holotescu, who tracks the Romanian blog world for her company Timsoft. The online version of Evenimentul Zilei, ran by long time Vivid writer Alex Ulmanu, recently added four blogs to its site, and a Bucharest radio station devoted a two-hour show to blogs. Other traditional media, which have largely ignored the phenomenon as it blossomed elsewhere, are jumping on the bandwagon. There are so many articles being written about the trend that bloggers introduce them as “yet another story on blogs.”

With numbers and recognition growing, there is an argument to be made in favour of blogs taking centre stage. Optimists see 2006 as the year blogs will become “mainstream,” grow more focused and topical, enter schools, compete with news sources for attention and become a harbinger for future developments in the technology sector. Pessimists see an increase in blog writing and (especially) reading, and business opportunities for savvy entrepreneurs who invest in technology, but not much societal impact beyond that.

Frank O'Connor

“The blog in today’s Romania can be found in a small but deep hole, in a long forgotten field at the back of a disused factory,” says Frank O’Connor, Vivid’s webmaster who runs a web design company in Bucharest and blogs about life here. “As far as I know, the public is generally very unaware of blogs. The market share for Internet use is still small.”

Internet use in Romania hovers around 20 per cent, almost half the average European penetration rate, but growth has been rapid in the past five years. The current state of Internet access is not unlike the blogosphere – the Romanian blog is a rebellious teen: obstinate, immature, irreverent, yet craving attention. Not only do most bloggers embody this profile, but society as a whole snubs them like the all-knowing teacher who sends students back to their desks with insults instead of praise.

Most accounts track the spark of the Romanian blogosphere to 2003, when several tech-savvy individuals embraced the technology. Antonio Eram, one of the brains behind WeBlog.ro, a service that enables users to set up their own blogs, said on a radio show that he remembers only one article on the topic being printed in 2003. The story, he recalled, ended with a psychologist commenting about bloggers being self-absorbed and isolated from the community.

Three years later, bloggers meet in pubs and bars and they suspect more real-life community-building will follow. “As I see things developing, in two years – maximum – there will be regular meetings between bloggers about IT, management, and so on,” says blogger Andrei Rosca. “I wouldn’t miss those for the world.”

Holotescu says that although there are less bloggers in Romania than in other European countries, many have a more committed fan base and stronger bonds with their readers.

So who blogs in Romania? A recent study shows men outnumber women more than two to one, and most bloggers are between the ages of 20 and 29. Ovidiu Scarlat, who blogs from Iasi, says bloggers use mostly pseudonyms online. In real life they are university or high school students, or recent graduates. Radu Ionescu, one of a growing number of business entrepreneurs who publishes online, sees two categories of bloggers: managers who see blogging as a way to communicate inside and outside the company and non-managers who are establishing a “personal brand” to boost their careers.

There are Romanians who blog from abroad and foreigners who blog from within Romania, but their approach is – for the most part – more focused and less personal.

Blogs written by Romanians in Romania are eclectic and many suffer from a mild form of attention deficit disorder when it comes to sticking to a format or topic area. Scarlat says bloggers use their space to publish everything from pictures to thoughts to literature to news to critiques of present-day Romanian society.

There is also a lot of talk in Romanian blogging circles about “personal branding” and using the blog as an uncensored forum for personal thoughts or diary-like entries that will make one famous in the virtual community. This is the appeal of blogging –the ultimate technological meritocracy – you can go from one reader, yourself, to millions.

The American blogger was instantly comfortable with this paradigm: rise from nobody to become somebody. But the successful American blogger also understood that success was based on providing information others could relate to on a societal level. Talking Points Memo, Instapundit or Wonkette are popular because they dissect politics, culture, media and even break national news. “A weblog that won’t offer interesting and useful information will disappear because it won’t find an audience,” says Holotescu.

George Hari Popescu

George Hari Popescu, who teaches new media and journalism at the University of Bucharest and is a blogger himself, is optimistic about the phenomenon’s growth in Romania, but says there is still a lot of hedonism and voyeurism in writing and reading blogs. “I’m still waiting for informative blogs, for original journals,” he says. “We can’t talk about blogs in Romania as alternative media.”

Sorin Adam Matei, who teaches and studies new forms of communication at Purdue University in Indiana and blogs at Pagini.com, agrees that blogs have an individualistic bias built in, and adds that a blog reaches its full potential when it moves beyond reading like a diary and starts covering arts, politics and society.

Matei says that despite the recent growth, the Romanian blogosphere has not yet matured to that level – one reason being cultural differences. For blogs to become mainstream, Romania’s public intellectuals and media stars need to acknowledge their existence, he says. Because of Romania’s intellectual pecking order, Matei says, blogs won’t be a valid movement until people with the status of a Horia-Roman Patapievici or Cristian Tudor Popescu endorse them. Half a world away, George Popescu is thinking along the same lines.

“Every underground phenomenon has to be validated by the elite in order to be promoted by the media and enter common knowledge,” says Popescu. “We live in a world where stars are fabricated in a snap of fingers and we have to use those stars to promote other stars or phenomena.”

Whether this acknowledgement will come in 2006 or not, Retea says she will continue to follow the recipe that made her popular: “I don’t intend to make my blog a newsletter, that’s for sure,” she says. “The personal touch and the human-interest themes make it interesting. You have the press to write objectively.”