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Thu. May 09, 2002

Have Another Cup, Jonah

Have Another Cup, Jonah – Folks are all a-twitter about Mickey Kaus’ deal to move his weblog within Slate, maybe hoping it will be the beginning of a trend. I don’t know, and don’t expect any ’zines to be knocking on my door, or those of 99.999% of web log authors.

But, my, my, Jonah Goldberg at the National Review doesn’t seem to like this one bit: "Rarely in the history of humanity have so many smart people made such a big deal out of something so inconsequential." Apparently Jonah’s been living in a cave for the past media decade and missed out on tidal wave coverage of topics ranging from Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire, to the type of underwear worn by political candidates.

"No offense to Mickey Kaus who runs a great site or to Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds, who seem to think this is a Video-Killed-the-Radio-Star moment, but who cares?" Quite a few people other than you, in the event that makes any difference. I find that’s sometimes a sign I should look closer. "Reynolds, a devout free-marketer no less, sounds like an aging hippy railing against Kauss ’sell-out’ to a ’soulless monopolistic corporation.’ " More coffee, Mr. Beam? I read the same words over my first cup, and got the opposite tongue-in-cheek read (and Jonah admits he needs more coffee). I also got a clue from the fact the Professor ran an interview with Mickey announcing the news. An aging hippy railing against the deal would hardly be the choice to first trumpet it.

"Come on! Blogging is a good and useful format, but ultimately it’s just a twenty-first century form of a newspaper column with some interesting bells and whistles." Yeah, if there were millions of newspapers running columns, and more than a handful of them actually linked things outside their site, yep, it would be just like the world of web logs …. except for that pesky Barrier of Entry those inside seem to sometimes forget.

C’mon, Jonah, blogging is a good and useful format precisely because it gives publishing power to common people with no hope of ever having a newspaper column. You are priviledged to read the thoughts of dozens of people you respect that three years ago were a total black hole in your life. There’s been no sudden Punditry Renaissance in that time, there’s been a new means of publishing. To say it’s just a modern form of newpaper column diminishes this new form, and the people you read who use it every day.

They would not exist in your life, if this was just an evolution of an old form, the newspaper column. But there’s no paper. There’s no ink. There’s no editor. There’s no min/max wordage. There’s no deadline. And there’s very little comparison. While I guess I can understand someone trying to relate it within their own experience, those of us who’ve never been paid to publish a column of any type see this as a new literary form, as pretentious as that might sound. You can say it’s an evolution of journals, but they can’t reference, link, and quote another journal or information source, then riff on it. You can say it’s an evolution of the newspaper column, but there’s none of the selection and editing process, none of the barriers that keep someone like me from running these very words in tomorrow’s Atlanta Constitution.

It may draw aspects from things that have come before, but it’s an entirely new form. And it’s not going away. There’s a new path for the cream to rise.

"Kaus is going to take money from a tighten your sphincters everyone! magazine to write a column he’d be writing anyway! Earth to Blogosphere: get over yourselves."

Blogosphere to Media Pundits: Likewise, we’re sure.

I could be wrong, but the causation of this tone appears to me to be more than just a lack of caffeine. This sentence says a lot: "Writing is supposed to be about persuading the most people possible."

No, Jonah, that’s apparently what writing has become to you. Not all of us have the same aspirations, motivations or intentions as you. And by the way, just because you reach more people doesn’t necessarily mean you persuade more. You didn’t this morning.