Tom Scocca wrote a funny column about bloggers called “TomScocca.com: Blogging Off Daily Can Make You Blind” for this morning’s New York Observer. He interviewed a number of old-media writers who’ve taken to blogging on the side, myself among them, and his tone is slightly snarky but basically friendly, if you know what I mean:
What blogging provides, [Teachout] said, is an “immediacy, informality and independence that you can’t find in the print media.”
He’s not worried, he said, about using up his ideas on the blog. “I really see the blog as a kind of public notebook or sketchbook,” he said. Part of the appeal, he said, “is that backstage glimpse it gives of the writer’s life.”
Blogging is more spontaneous than regular writing, but it’s writing nonetheless–as opposed to spontaneous blathering on cable TV, he said: “Blogging, by contrast, I think …. ” (Here my notes, in my hasty scrawl, appear to say “CRIDLY OCITHS”) ” … takes us back to a more considered but spontaneous” form of expression….
Not that any carefully constructed device can protect you from the withering and omnipresent scorn of the blogosphere, should it think it’s being attacked. The blogosphere is sensitive.
“I could write an account of this conversation while we are having it,” Terry Teachout said. I checked–he didn’t. Whew.
Indeed not. In fact, I happily certify that all direct quotations attributed to me in “Blogging Off Daily Can Make You Blind” are pristinely accurate and not taken out of context. (Scocca takes better notes than I do!)
Still, I want to mention one thing I said that Scocca didn’t print, which is that writing a piece solely about print-media journalists who’ve taken up blogging seems to me to be more than a little bit beside the point. In my opinion, most of the really interesting people in the blogosphere–all of whom, needless to say, are represented in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column–launched their blogs without any significant print-media experience. They’re the pioneers, whereas I’m just a Johnny-come-lately who’s having a ball and making all sorts of cool new friends along the way. What’s more, I think it’s a hugely significant development that these bloggers are now migrating to the print media in fast-growing numbers–without giving up their blogs. If you seek the future of American journalism, look to them.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s the big story of blogging, and I hope Tom Scocca gets around to writing it soon.