Ragtag collection of news diaries....?
Yah, the Revolutionary Army was ragtag, too. <gg>
The Beam article was an ill-informed rant, the guy is really clueless.
I love it that the FT writer is starting her own weblog. Here is Virginia Postrel's reaction to that column.
FACT-CHECKING: Louise Kehoe's Financial Times column on blogs isn't snotty, and it does a decent job of surveying the field. But it exhibits the kind of carelessness about facts I've come to associate (perhaps unfairly) with the British press. Andrew Sullivan didn't say he "expects to be able to draw a salary 'more than comparable' with his earnings as former editor of The New Republic." He said, "I will be able to pay myself a salary more than comparable to my salary at The New Republic. It won't make me rich, but it sure will pay the rent and then some." This is the sort of statement that a good reporter asks about. Yes, Andrew used to be editor of TNR, quite some years ago. But his most recent job there was as the TRB columnist, presumably at a significantly lower salary than the editor makes. FT readers shouldn't get the idea that blogging, even at Sullivan levels, pays executive salaries, especially since it generally doesn't pay minimum wage. Kehoe should have checked.
And, while we're on the subject of former jobs, I haven't been "editor of Reason magazine" since January 2000, and I haven't even been on the Reason payroll since the first of this year. It's all right there on my bio page. You don't even have to contact me.
On a more substantive point, I think the "there are no editors" point is overrated, for a couple of reasons. First, what bloggers do is one of the most important functions of editors: selecting interesting stories. By writing this page, instead of just my columns and books, I get to do the sort of thing I did at Reason, directing readers to writers I think have important or interesting things to say. What I don't get to do is commission articles on subjects I want explored but lack the time or expertise to do myself (although sometimes I get lucky and write something that inspires some other editor to assign a story). And, of course, bloggers can't poke at articles before they're printed, only afterwards.
Second, and this is the point I've made in numerous interviews, the experience of writing without editors is nothing new for me. I spent 10 years doing my most important writing—my Reason columns—without an editor. Yes, I had a lot of smart colleagues, but (maybe because I'm so bossy) they mostly pointed out typos and the occasional bad sentence, not fundamental errors of fact or reasoning. Yes, writing Reason columns was harder and more disciplined than blogging, but that wasn't because there was some big mean editor standing over me. It was because I had a responsibility to the magazine and its readers, not only to do a good job but, for instance, to offer new and intelligent insights on whatever the most important story of the day, regardless of my personal inclinations. (Those insights also had to stay good for at least six weeks, because of the lag between the writing and the magazine's delivery.) And over the years, I wrote many editorials through stake-through-the-eye migraines, something I simply don't do for you dear blog readers.
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