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10:02:00 AM EDT
Hearing My Kind of Town -- Frank Sinatra
Blogging Fever!
The New York Times catches up with bloggers. I thought at this point we'd exhausted the stories it was possible to do about discovering the whole blog and journal craze, but, okay -- hello, New York Times, nice to see you. There's one snarky comment I thought I'd single out:
"A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few."
Well, that's not true at all, of course: The reporter has clearly forgotten all about the centuries of person-to-person letter writing, and blogs and Journals to a very great extent are descended from the epistolary impulse. This is a consistent flaw in reporting about blogs and Journals: Reporters tend to think about them as mini-newspapers or magazines, but they are equally open letters to friends and strangers (who often then become friends).
So the chiding tone about the fundamental futility of writing Journals that aren't going to get a huge audience really is missing the point. People didn't write letters and think "what a shame only one person is going to read this."
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Circulation always lurks deep in newspaper people's brains.
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So true.
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I saw that artilce first thing this morning, too. Good point, John.
Actually, it relates in a small way to your celebrity assignment a couple of weeks back. Have we become a culture in which what you do and who you are don't matter unless Madonna's millions of fans hear about it?
(See, I do know the name of one celebrity <G>.)
http://journals.aol.com/oceanmrc/UNLOAD/
5/27/04 5:14 PM
Twas never thus! WE glow for
and of ourselves Until we actually
Join ourselves over ice=creme.
The NYT reporter oughta bounce
more. {such 'letters' should be
posted more often}