Beware of the Blog, It Creeps…
“Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries,” says Forbes reporter Daniel Lyons. “Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns.” While the article does admit, in passing, that “attack blogs are but a sliver of the rapidly expanding blogosphere,” the overall tone is largely paranoiac and, unsurprisingly considering the source, always willing to take the corporation’s side against the bloggers. In this world, there’s pretty much no such thing as speaking truth to power; there’s only badmouthing The Man because, well, you’re a no-good agitator.
A typical jab: “If blogging is journalism, then some of its practitioners seem to have learned the trade from Jayson Blair.” It cracks me up that Lyons then cites Michelle Malkin as an example of such a blogger, apparently forgetting that she’s first and foremost a syndicated columnist.
The key to the story, of course, is something that’s been an open secret since the days when you had to go to Usenet for online commentary: There’s an awful lot of nutjobs running around loose on the Internet. Always have been, always will be. This isn’t about bloggers crushing corporations or other institutional power bases; this is strictly about nutjobs with nothing better to do with their time than harass the people they think are looking at them funny. If they didn’t have blogs, they’d go about it some other way.
28 October 2005 | theory |
New York Times Nonsense, Part II
posted by Pearl Abraham
There is something very neurotic going on at the NYT Book Announcer (a.k.a. the NYTB Review), whose editor determines first not to review much fiction, and this in the face of predictions of doom for fiction, then reviews only fiction by writers who are already widely known, and this week decides to publish an essay titled “Publish and Perish,†by Elizabeth Royte, that jeers at the lives of these very writers whom they have ignored. How is it that after having a hand in the perishing of these books, the Book Announcer gets to, parasitically, still live off them by writing about the results of their policy? Could it be that all this is part of a plan to generate controversy on behalf of the NYTBA, in other words, as advised by their publicist, in order to gain readers? They’ve done it before, about a year ago, with the gratuitous Wendy Shalit essay on Jewish writing.
And then, strangely, some of the facts in this Royte essay aren’t entirely based in fact. Honest publicists don’t usually take on novels that are already published, but require at least a 6-month lead. And, as it happens, it is often publishers who employ these outside publicists. And so on.
24 October 2005 | theory |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
