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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 29, 2003

TT: In transit

December 29, 2003 by Terry Teachout

I’ll be spending Monday making my slow way from Smalltown, U.S.A., to the Upper West Side of New York. On Tuesday and Wednesday I’ll be back at my desk, writing and blogging and blogging and writing. I have a way cool adventure planned for Thursday: I’m taking an Amtrak sleeper from New York to Chicago, something I’ve always wanted to do (I love trains). I’ll be hanging out with Our Girl in Chicago and seeing plays for The Wall Street Journal all weekend, returning to New York via Amtrak on Monday.


Mail will be answered at some point in the interstices of all this activity.


See you Tuesday.

TT: The reason why

December 29, 2003 by Terry Teachout

As I start to sift through all those blogs that went unread during my week in Smalltown, U.S.A., I’m digging up all sorts of interesting things. Here, for instance, is a revealing little ripple from Instapundit:

BLOGGERS DON’T NEED EDITORS OR PUBLISHERS: Strangely, this leads Editor and Publisher to dub bloggers “self-important.”


Self-important, self-sufficient. Whatever.


UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky emails: “I’d add ‘self-correcting’, with the emphasis on ‘correcting’. Can you recall the last time any newspaper issued a correction for factual errors on the editorial page? I can’t.”

Me, neither. And the thing we in the blogosphere have discovered that has yet to penetrate through the thick skulls of editorial-page editors is this: Self-correction is interesting. It’s one of the reasons why I like reading blogs, and why I like writing this one.


I know something about editorial pages. I worked on a good one for several years, and also wrote a biography of H.L. Mencken, who spent a sizable chunk of his career doing the same thing. As a result of his experience, Mencken had nothing but contempt but most editorial pages and editorial writers–you can find the details in The Skeptic–but he made a special point of printing any letter to the editor that attacked him personally.


OGIC and I get a lot of e-mail. Not only do we answer all of it, we post some of it, invariably to readable effect, because virtually none of it comes from cranks. It comes from smart people who read what we write and have smart things to say about it–sometimes amplifying what we’ve written, sometimes challenging it. And because neither one of us makes the mistake of assuming that we’re always right, we’re happy to keep the ball rolling by letting you show that we’re not.


The ease and immediacy with which blogs permit self-correction, public response, and further amplification is central to their appeal. Take another look at that Instapundit item: first he quotes from (and links to) a published article. Then he comments on it. Then, a little later, he receives and posts a comment on his comment. All this happened well within the space of what used to be called a “news cycle.” In fact, it probably happened inside of an hour–maybe even less. OGIC and I (usually) aren’t that quick on the draw with our e-mail, but the point is that we could be, given sufficient time. And once we do get on the stick and post what you have to say, it frequently results in a whole series of profitable exchanges involving all sorts of other people. What’s more, our referral log keeps us up to date about what other bloggers have to say about us, and when appropriate we pass that on, too.


Is this “self-important”? I don’t think so. If anything published in this space is important, it’s because you make it so, by reading it and responding to it and linking to it–a process that can take place not in a month or a week, but right now. Which is why blogging has caught on so quickly, and is becoming an increasingly significant part of the world of journalism: it’s fast, and anyone can do it. You don’t need a degree in journalism (nobody needs a degree in journalism), much less a printing press. To re-paraphrase the much-paraphrased words of A.J. Liebling, freedom of the press used to be for those who owned one. Now it’s for anyone with a computer, a modem, and something to say.


Take it from one who’s spent his entire adult life writing for and editing newspapers and magazines: except for politicians, journalists as a group are the most self-important people in the world. That’s why some of them are so horrified by blogging, and go out of their way to knock it. They don’t like the idea of a level playing field for opinion. They like it much better when theirs are the only opinions in play. And now they’re out of luck. As Rodgers and Hammerstein might have put it, ain’t that too damn bad.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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