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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Blogoscopy



From an interview with Seymour Hersh in the Jewish Journal:


'JJ: New York magazine has a profile this week of Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, and they call him "America's Most Influential Journalist." What have bloggers like Drudge done to journalism, and how do you think it compares to the muckrakers that you came of age with?


SH: There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually -- and I hate to tell this to The New York Times or the Washington Post -- we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism.

I've been working for The New Yorker ... since '93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about. Couldn't care less now. It doesn't matter, because I'll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it's online, we just get flooded.

So, we have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven't come to terms with it. I don't think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.'


This is as good a time as any for UD to admit that she's not been reading the print New York Times, which she and Mr. UD get delivered, for a number of months now. She isn't even doing the Sunday crossword puzzle! She fiddled with the puzzle a bit on the car trip home from Rehoboth, but even there, as soon as the spectacular views from the Bay Bridge opened up, she put it aside.... Of course, as a blogeuse, UD spends a lot of time online, and the NYT is fully available to her there, and she can be much more selective, and it isn't awkward to hold...

Speaking of which, a sort of self-defeating thing seems to be going on with the print NYT. It keeps proliferating new sections. And certain established sections -- like the Sunday Arts thing -- have gotten insanely thick. The result is a newspaper whose physical bulk and dizzying number of stories discourages UD from the outset. There's a twenty-first century elegance to online reading, and an unwieldy twentieth century feel to paper, made worse in this case by what I take to be the Times' desperate effort to keep me reading by throwing more goodies at me.


--- hersh interview via andrew sullivan ---