With Blinders On

Christian Crumlish

Still not getting it, in the second day of this shortened week of pretend email messages, Andersen responds to some conciliatory comments from Sullivan with a journalist-centric view of blogging pro and con:

Proof that blogs are not scalable conceptually: As an informing principle for an entire daily newspaper, fear and loathing of the New York Times is not quite sufficient.

What "doesn't scale"? Blogging as fact-checking of major media? That's just one slice off the nogging.

Granted, the next comment is in the context of answering the question "Are blogs going to drive a significant transformation of the press?" but the next sequence continues to focus on one facet of blogging:

Providing a self-publishing outlet for professional journalists' rejected print pieces isn't exactly, as we used to say, not so far back in the day, a killer app. I agree that providing talented unknown writers a means of getting prose in front of readers and editors is a nice hypothetical blog virtue.... As we've learned in every digital realm, the proliferation of groovy new tools to make and distribute media (music, movies, bloggers' pensées, whatever) does not expand the more or less fixed pool of genuine talent in the world.

Well, sure, marginal is all you ever get. Anyone who says everyone will blog or all bloggers are undiscovered good writers etc, I say still does not understand the medium (not even as well as Sullivan who at least gets that the fame game is only one layer of the cake).

And the idea that blogging is simply an on-deck circle for people wishing to become journalists misses the point that there are new kinds of writing coming about here. Some people will do good blogs not because they want to work for magazines in New York but because they have a talent for blogging.