Daily Blague

Dear RJ,

Also read the piece on Wikipedia.

It's a Bad Air Day in Va. I wrote about it on my blog :).

Plus my summaries of the Trollope conference have been getting a continual readership.

No longer in a clock tower by the sea,
Elinor

Thanks for linking Lemann's "Amateur Hour" I would have waited for the print addition. As Lemann points out, nicely quoting David Weinberger

“On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”

and then adding at the end of his essay

As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away.

The Net has not yet arrived as a venue for journalism and in its current form may not have to scope to mimic or compete with legacy media. I'm certainly not ready yet for The New Yorker solely on the Net. I grew up with the print addition, I want the print addition to take to work to read at lunch and to drag back home to read the longer articles. I suppose I could do the same by downloading to my iPOD or something similar but I want the pages in my hand, perhaps I'm just old. Right now the Net is very much like CB radio and like the CB radio if you want the truth about anything larger than a five mile radius around your truck or anything more immediate than the last five minutes to five hours you had best go to a more professional source, like broadcast or print media. The Net is new media to be sure and a new channel of personal communication, truly the largest CB channel with the greatest reach ever, but still not news in any depth nor journalism of any refinement. OpEd style blogs and most personal blogs are to me just a big bar room or back fence conversation, often interesting and well spoken but all the same largely idle talk with the noteable exception of these green background pages. But then who would go to a bar or the back fence as well prepared to chat in such debpth and breadth as our host here? These pages are not anything I can categorize, yet, other than to say they are DB.