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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Notes on blogging

February 1, 2004 by Terry Teachout

1. It’s almost impossible to explain what a blog is to someone who’s never seen one. That’s the mark of a true innovation.


2. I know very few people over fifty, and scarcely any over sixty, who “get” blogging.


3. Blogs without links aren’t blogs. Blogs without blogrolls aren’t blogs. Blogs without mailboxes aren’t blogs.


4. The blogosphere is a pure market–but one in which no money changes hands. If you can afford the bandwidth and your ego is strong enough, it doesn’t matter whether anybody wants to read what you have to say. But the more you care about how many people are reading your blog, the more your blogging will be shaped by their approval, whether you get paid or not.


5. Politicians and celebrities rarely make good bloggers. They’re not interested enough in what other people are thinking.


6. Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing. That’s why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it.


7. The whole point of a blog is that its author controls its content. That’s why no major newspaper will ever be successful at running in-house blogs: the editors won’t allow it. The smart ones will encourage their best writers to blog on their own time–and at their own risk. The dumb ones will refuse to let any of their writers blog, on or off the job.


8. For now, blogs presuppose the existence of the print media. That will probably always be the case–but over time, the print media will become increasingly less important to the blogosphere.


9. Within a decade, blogs will replace op-ed pages.


10. Blogs will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century. Their influence will be disproportionate to their circulation.


11. Blogs are what online magazines were supposed to be.


12. Art blogging will never be as popular as war blogging. More people care about politics than the arts.


13. Blogging is inherently undemocratic in one important way: it privileges literacy. Like e-mail, it is dividing the world into two unequal classes: people who feel comfortable expressing themselves through the written word and people who don’t.


14. If you want to be noticed, you have to blog every day.


15. An impersonal blog is a contradiction in terms.

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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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