Floating Blog

We have very little patience for the ongoing conversation
about blogs and whether anybody cares about them or not. Like most
things, it makes very little sense to judge a whole medium or
phenomenon generically. There are good blogs and there are bad blogs.
(Helpful hint: paid professionals are paid professionals for a reason.
They have a huge advantage over the passionate amateur, because they
don’t have to actually work an honest job for a living. This is no
guarantee of quality; it just guarantees that you can complain to their
bosses if they really stink.)

That
said, there have been lots and lots of first-rate bloggers who have
made the leap to the pros. One thing you can say about blogging is that
it gives a person lots of daily practice in the craft of writing (or at
least summarizing and linking). Exhibit A: James Lileks. We think this
man has entirely gone off the deep end of paranoia, and he should be
ashamed of his chameleon-like conversion to a shrill conservative
alarmist in the wake of 9/11 and fatherhood, whichever came first. But
we are also awed by his command of the language, and the ease with
which he can turn a delightful phrase and a killing joke. Being
professionals around here, we know that good writing trumps bad faith
every day of the week. We count ourselves reluctant fans, but admiring
fans nonetheless.

We launched this daily blog thing about a
month ago, and all along have been kind of openly obsessed with media
and media criticism. This is a beat we don’t cover so much in the
magazine. Seeing as how the blog here is supposed to open a window into
our office (More windows! Open-able! Yes please!), it’s natural that
our “water-cooler” chatter has more to do with the internal workings of
the media business than with what we publish in the magazine.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the blog. Yesterday, we decided to publish exactly the same thing on the blog and at the website,
under the aegis of the magazine. When it was offered in a non-blog
context—without the blogspot.com URL and without the other obvious
visual scaffolding of a blog that you see around you here —we were
suddenly being read all over the internet. Do you know why?

Yesterday’
s piece was a text-book case of blogging. We read three or four
commentaries on media, and then added our own, without any new
reporting or factual information. We just saw some interesting
connections, and we hoped that we were able to convey them in clear,
entertaining language.

Now, we don’t know if we succeeded in
doing that, and we earnestly hope the next paycheck is still on its
way. But we do know that the marketplace is already judging blogs not
on their context but on their content. Folks like Wonkette, Andrew
Sullivan, TMFTML, Dong Resin— these are all amazing writers, all of
whom are now being paid to do what they have a real talent to do.

The
first two were great writers long before the word “blog,” or even the
Web existed; the latter two were “discovered” by traditional media, and
have since been put to work earning their own way. We’ve even been
known to harrass a blogger or two until they’ll take money from us, no
kidding.) We could give you lots of other examples, but then we’d have
to start tracking down URLs, and we hate having to do that. Maybe
that’s what the essential difference is between a blogger and a “real
journalist.”—The Editor in Cheese