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January 26, 2007
MSM art-types blog -- and well
Last year I was the low-light on a panel of fairly distinguished arts journos. (The panel discussion was held at a National Arts Journalism Program conference.) Our ranks included Bloomberg's Jeff Weinstein, NYT arts editor Sam Sifton, PRI's Kurt Andersen, and others. At one point Sifton said something about his staff and blogging and I replied that I thought that the MSM should probably hire bloggers to blog because to that point I hadn't seen a lot of daily journos really figure out the whole blogging thing.
Now, eight months later, a bunch of print journos are active in the art-blogging realm: There's Geoff Edgers at the Boston Globe, Richard Lacayo at Time, Regina Hackett at the Seattle P-I, the Washington City Paper's Jeffry Cudlin, Jen Graves at The Stranger, and so on.
It has become obvious that I was wrong, that many daily journos eventually figured it out. Sure, many daily journos who blog write endlessly long, character-lacking posts (see many of the 'blogs' at washingtonpost.com, for example), but in the arts realm all of the writers I just mentioned maintain entertaining sites. All of them interact with the rest of the blogosphere. Few of them attempt to drive an agenda via blog the way experienced bloggers do (the political blogs excel at this), but in time...
Anyway, I was wrong. And I'm really enjoying being wrong on this one well into the future. I'd love it if Doug Harvey started blogging. And Jerry Saltz, Roberta Smith, Robert Hughes, Alan Riding, Ren Weschler, Kenneth Baker...
UPDATE: My wrongness continues: Doug Harvey's new-ish blog is here.
Posted January 26, 2007 11:28 AM
