As I was invited to dinner at Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's last weekend, I made a valiant attempt to overcome her loathing of blogs. No luck, unfortunately. As a matter of fact, I met Yasmin before she was a columnist, and I suspect that if there'd been such a thing as blogging in those days, she would have had a good one. Her main objection to the upstart form is that she's been on the receiving end of a flock of amateur scribes who couldn't tell the difference between facts and gossip. Not a pleasant experience, although another of my friends once had a Daily Mail reporter hanging around on her doorstep, trying to get dirt on her boyfriend, who was (shock, horror) a divorced man. All in all, proper journalists still have the potential to do more damage.
While a blogger such as TPM's Josh Marshall can sometimes do a lot of good:
"It just seemed natural. I liked the informality of the writing. The freedom of it appealed to me," Marshall said. "It just looked like fun. I saw it as a loss leader for my journalism." Once he started, however, he never stopped. He continued to freelance, but gradually moved more and more of his attention to the blog, living in near poverty as a result. When he needed money to do something for the blog, he asked his readers for it. Remarkably, they gave it to him.
[Via Arts & Letters Daily]
An interesting profile, even if some parts appear to have been written for the benefit of Rip Van Winkle:
Blogs tend to be informal, cheap to produce, free to consume, fast, heavily referential, self-referential and vain because of it; profane, accident-prone yet self-correcting.
Just in case you didn't know...
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