If you aren’t blogging your vision, you are not in touch with what over 4 million other bloggers are doing. And making history. To quote Liebling, freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Look what Martin Luther did with the press. The price of the press is now near zero, and there are millions of Luthers.Here is a conversion with Hugh Hewitt, a nationally syndicated conservative talk show host and author of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World. It’s copied, with permission, from the Focus on the Family blog.Q. One of the first points you make in your book is that trust is absolutely essential to a blogger’s success. How do you develop that over time?A. I think it’s earned. It’s the reason why, when you open The Wall Street Journal, you trust it and its editorial pages. It’s the reason why you don’t, for example, trust the Los Angeles Times when you pick it up. There’s a track record of accuracy in the first case, or of bias in the second, which didn’t occur overnight, but accumulated over years and decades. And so, a new blogger brings whatever reputation they have to the table, to begin with. And then they add to it or detract from it based on every day’s postings.It’s obviously easier for someone like you — who has a profile, a radio show. You come into it with trust. What about folks who are just starting out and they really have no profile or no history?I think part of it is borrowed from the sites that link to you. For example, I try to name a new blogger of the month every month. One guy I like a lot right now is Randy Elrod, who is a worship and arts pastor in Nashville, Tenn. And his blog is called Ethos. So I link to it as one of my blogs of the month for March. Hopefully, that will add some credibility to Randy in terms of people going to look at it to give him a chance. Because, of course, with 8 million domestic blogs, getting people to your site is the first challenge. There’s a certain credentialing that goes on, and you borrow the credibility of other people.You single out lawyers as a group of people that tend to make good bloggers. For people who don’t have a law degree, what kinds of skills or interests work well for this sort of thing?An ability to research. And that is a skill that anyone can develop who is serious about it. It means double-checking and triple-checking sources; it means being open to information from a variety of experts who are out there on the Web. And it means putting the time in in front of a computer. Ph.Ds are also great bloggers, because they’ve developed the extraordinary research skills that go with earning advanced degrees, much like lawyers who have to research every single day.I think you’ll find, as well, that a flair for humor is really one of the great defining qualities — especially self-deprecating humor — of a good blogger.We find here at Focus, as Christians, humor is kind of hard to do if you try to give it any edge at all. Is there a higher threshold for folks like you who have a certain moral profile?Yeah, I do think you can’t be — for example, you can never be vulgar. And a lot of the Web humor is vulgar, and a lot of it is crude. And I think, though, that in the long run, the sites that play to that diminish their audience, they don’t gain it. I’ve never heard of someone not coming to a Web site because it wasn’t vulgar. I’ve heard a lot of people refusing to go to Web sites that are. So, if you’re patient, persistent and good — and you can also be funny — you have a leg up.Scrappleface by Scott Ott — Scott’s a Christian — it’s very, very funny. It’s not vulgar. So it can be done.One of the more fascinating aspects of your book is your comparison of the information reformation ushered in by blogs to the Great Reformation. Run down what you were saying there for our readers.Some people misunderstood it, suggesting that I’m arguing that this development is as great for the church as was Martin Luther’s nailing of his theses. Not at all. I’m talking about the parallel in institutional clash that went on.In the early 1500s, Rome controlled all the information flow: They decided who would be credentialed to interpret Scripture, they kept Scripture in Latin, and they issued decrees. And Luther challenged their information monopoly, both in terms of their authority to interpret, and he translated Scripture into German. That was truly revolutionary. What allowed him to do that was the printing press. He also was an enormously prolific pamphleteer. And so he took authority in employing the new technology and worked an enormous change in the power relationships of the world at that time by humbling first the Vatican and then launching the counter-reformation within the Vatican, which was a good thing for Catholicism.Today, the information monopoly, like the Vatican of old, was shared out between very few players — four networks, a handful of major papers, a couple of newsweeklies. They would report the agenda, they decided the agenda, and they decided what and who would be heard. You had to persuade someone to be able to persuade someone. And that is shattered. As was Rome’s authority shattered by Luther, so is mainstream media’s authority shattered by the rise of the blogs.So, there’s only one Luther, but in this information reformation . . . . . . there are millions of Luthers. And they all arrived at the same time. And it’s very, very confusing to mainstream media, which is acting like a dinosaur stuck in the swamp. It really is awesome to behold how frenzied they’ve become in their movements and their scorn of the bloggers, and their just despising of the fact that their authority’s crumbled.Our audience is Christian, and they’re not only interested in politics and public policy, but our focus really is on encouraging people to use their voice to influence public policy. How can the blogosphere be leveraged to make Christians more effective policy activists?A number of ways. First, I think that pastors, especially — who are natural communicators — need to learn to blog and discover that they are allowed to say on the blog what they may not say from the pulpit with regard to matters of politics and public policy. And so, though many have had to live in legitimate fear that the IRS or activist leftist groups would attack them for political positions made from the pulpit, they don’t have to worry about that on the Internet.No. 2, just informing themselves on the issues has become so much easier. John Mark Reynolds, who is a professor of philosophy at Biola University, runs a great blog — I’ve linked it over there on the left side of HughHewitt.com — where he writes the sort of stuff that can inform anyone out there in Christendom about how to think about issues and how to persuade people. Lots of these blogs are both going to deepen church life by allowing pastors and other people of influence to deepen their connection with their congregation, but it’s also going to raise the intellectual bar by making available, through trusted portals, ways to think about information that ought to be considered. It really deepens the ability of the church to enter into people’s daily lives.In Chapter 12, you talk about how you’d use blogs to maximize opportunities in certain fields. Let’s run through some scenarios involving policy battles coming up for family advocates. For instance, how can blogs help our movement enact judicial filibuster reform?Activists who want judicial confirmation to be returned to its constitutional norm should, with great respect and concern for the dignity of the office, address those senators who are considered soft on the rule change that it will be necessary to end the filibusters. And they ought to do it over the Internet.So, blogging — as has happened in the Terri Schiavo case — makes available the connections, quickly, to those in authority with the ability to make a difference. So, right now, the blogs ought to be suggesting to their readers and their e-activists that they contact key senators with a heartfelt appeal to support the majority leader when he brings forth the rule change.How about getting a social conservative nominated and seated on the Supreme Court?I think that there are lots of law blogs out there, right now, that are considering the short list, and the more bloggers who say, “We think so-and-so ought to go first, because he is allegedly the most difficult to confirm, and we ought to go right into the face of the wind instead of sail with it at our backs,” that’s a good message that needs to be communicated again and again.Passing the Marriage Protection Amendment?That’s, again, legislative activism. We need to influence constitutional reform by bringing concerted attention, focus and respectful communication to bear upon the legislators who need to be hearing from us.That’s the second time you mentioned being respectful. It seems intuitive, but why is that something you keep hitting?Because so much of the communication in the blogosphere from the left is vulgar and hate-filled. I see it every day in my in-box — I’m sure you see it as well. That has never persuaded a single individual. A personal attack or a threat is a guarantee to push someone deeper into a corner into which they may have already painted themselves. Persuasion begins with recognition of the dignity of everyone, even those with whom we disagree.Here’s a big one. How can the blogosphere be used to eventually get Roe v. Wade overturned?It’s huge that we have the ability to bring the conversation in the public square to bear on the terrible toll that procedure has taken, both on the innocents who were never born and the women who went through the procedure. That means, finally, we have methods of communication other than shouting and other than begging the media to carry us, to just put the platform out there and to make the arguments in public. And that’s huge, to the extent that people can now carry on a discussion about how partial-birth abortion is, in fact, an atrocity — and to do so without the media filter which has always spoken the muffled language of the left.Here’s my last question. The most successful blogs are right-of-center ideologically. So is talk radio. Why is it that the left can’t dominate the new media like they dominate big media?Well, I have to point out that they do have some very successful blogs on the left, although they are not persuasive. They attract fervency and they’re very sticky — people stay there for a long time. But they’re very circular and very immune to right thinking and reason.The reason that center-right blogs have been so successful is that they have been quite generous in their attribution of credit to others and their willingness to send people to other places. They are not greedy for praise or elevation; they’re interested in the cause. And the cause is so much more noble on the center-right side — freedom, dignity, natural law, human rights — that I think the power of the argument is just overwhelming public opinion in a way it has never been allowed to do in the modern era, when media became so center-left.So it’s as simple as: On the right, people are for something. On the left, people are against something?Many. Yep. Absolutely true.