As everyone in the blogosphere now knows or soon will, The New Republic shut down Lee Siegel’s blog last week when its editors caught him engaging in “sock-puppetry,” which is blogtalk for posting comments to your own blog under a phony name. (Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, has posted a link-rich summary of the imbroglio.) Siegel has also been “suspended” from writing for TNR, and it’s widely expected that in due course he’ll be terminated.
The real scandal, of course, is that TNR deigned to publish so clueless a blowhard in the first place. But since Siegel’s blog has vanished into the memory hole, it strikes me that instead of dancing on his grave, we might do better to pause for a moment and consider the larger implications of what happened to him.
Having recently beat up on the old media
for their failure to come to terms with blogging, I don’t care to whip that horse again. The good news is that The New Republic is only one of a growing number of newspapers and magazines that have launched institutional blogs. The bad news is that most of them are mediocre. (The Boston Globe‘s Exhibitionist is a noteworthy exception to the rule.) That’s predictable, since the very idea of an institutional blog is a contradiction in terms. The best blogs are idiosyncratic, unmediated expressions of an individual sensibility, a notion which tends to make old-media executives squirm, so much so that many print-media publications refuse to let their employees blog.
I think that’s a mistake. In fact, I think editors and reporters should be encouraged to blog independently of the publications for which they work. Frank Wilson, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s book-review editor, also blogs at Books, Inq. Not only is his blog worth reading in its own right, but frank postings like this one help strip away the mystery from the Inquirer‘s editorial decision-making processes. Such transparency is a special virtue of blogging, and one of the most valuable lessons the new media can teach the old media.
Speaking of transparency, The New Republic has had nothing further to say about Lee Siegel since its three-sentence announcement of his suspension. I hope (and expect) that the magazine’s editors will be more forthcoming about the matter in the near future. On the other hand, I give them full credit for acting so unhesitatingly and unequivocally to punish Siegel for an offense of whose very existence many middle-aged editors are doubtless unaware. If blogging is journalism–as I believe it is–then bloggers, be they institutional or independent, should be held to the same standards of professional conduct as the old-media types they love to rake over the coals.
By pulling the plug on Lee Siegel’s blog, the editors of The New Republic showed that they take blogging seriously. That’s a big step in the right direction.
UPDATE: The New York Times found Siegel’s suspension sufficiently noteworthy to run a news story about it.