... well, not really. Maxine at Petrona links to a discussion of MSM blogs: Blog Watches Dog. I was intrigued by this quote from Justin McKeating: "“I have yet to see a newspaper blog where the writer has got down and dirty with the readers. This defeats the object of blogging to a large extent and is seen as poor etiquette by many non-newspaper bloggers.”
Well, we welcome comments here - though we like them to be civil.
You coulda been a copy editor! I read right over that. I think the interaction that blogs make possible is wonderful. I think the snarky persona some in the blogosphere adopt is unfortuate. In my wild years I hung out with some very tough dudes. They never shot their mouths off, though -- but they sure knew how to shut up those who did.
ReplyDeleteYes, you get a lot of "displaced aggression" as a journal editor too. Not just from those whose work you can't offer to publish (I've had many a ripe insult from that fraternity, as if I were personally to blame for ruining their career), but also from people who write into correspondence columns, who were an early form of bloggers I suppose. It never ceases to amaze me how correspondents seem to think they have to write indignant, blaming prose about whatever article they are responding to, in order to get published.
ReplyDeleteIn Nature, which has a healthy correspondence page every week, we've never published blaming, hysterical letters ---we like lively ones and certainly published many critical ones, but not the unmeasured, unhinged variety. Yet our correspodents (some of whom are regular submitters) never seem to learn that you don't have to "shout" to get your point across.
Again, I think it is useful for us to remind ourselves from time to time of how very little we can actually be certain of. As Aquinas put it, "All things run into mystery."
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