Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Seems that link is incorrect... :( Great blog!

someday blogging will change the world. on that i have no doubt.

t4b*

* thanks for blogging

You could have been blogging at the grocery store that day and it still woulda been David. Maybe even more interesting, what with the endive and bulk candies.

In that way it was blogging. That, and I'm assuming you didn't get paid.

Fuck journalism*.

*I'm a journalism major and I approved this message.

David, I hate to take the BigMedia side, and again, you got slimed by USA Today, but ...

There's little point in speaking of "fershluggenering", along the lines of "I'm not doing journalism, I'm fershluggenering, which is defined as this undefineable thing I do which has no rules other than the rules of fershluggenering"

All is types of "writing". You're a *commentator*. You write good *commentary*. But there's no dearth of pundits, and no particular benefit _per se_ to adding a few more to the pile-on.

p.s.

And don't all you guys get tired of talking amongst yourselves? THERE ARE WOMEN WRITING ABOUT THESE VERY TOPICS OUT THERE, SOME WERE EVEN JOURNALISTS BEFORE SELLING OUT, AND SOME ARE AWARD WINNING WRITERS, SOME ARE CURRENTLY JOURNALISTS, AND SOME HAVE EVEN --GASP -- NAILED THESE VERY TOPICS PREVIOUSLY. YES THERE WAS LIFE BEFORE THE BLOGGING AND JOURNALISM DISCUSSION.

No offense, Dan, Dave, David, Dan, Don, Dan, Jay, Chuck, Charles, and a few more Dans and Daves. I just had to get that off my chest.

Thank you.

"And don't all you guys get tired of talking amongst yourselves?"

Nah.

Thinks of it like participatory soap-opera.

"Like sands through the hourglass ... so are the Blogs of Our Lives."

the Blogs of Our Lives." hehehehe

I can understand why David thinks politics is so important. I was a Heideggerian-case once, and thought that the individual person was always superior to the social "they." Then I found out that Heidegger himself was a traitor to this line of reasoning. Man is the zoon logon--political animal--according to classical thought. David is right in seeing politics as the valid social currency. Although I am no longer a Heidegger-case, I still see the individual as autonomously true (or false--a privitive mode). As far as "talking amongst yourselves," Jeneane, aren't you here? How meta is that?

Seth, bloggers are commentators, or at least I act as one. Or columnist. Or op-ed writer. Or editorialist. Or essayist. Or humorist. But, none of these is quite right, although they are helpful. I am writing for a different type of readership: Not a mass public but those who "self-organize" around my blog by choosing to read it and, sometimes, choosing to come back. I'm not going to be able to explain well why I think this is crucial. I want to think about it more.

Am I tired of writing about blogging? Yeah, except when something else about it pops its head up in the game of whack-a-mole we bloggers seem to like.

For the record: No, I didn't get paid. I would have been happy to be paid, though. Why not?

depends upon who's doing the paying and what the agreement is. depends upon if paid means you're part of a team, including an editor, including a CEO, shareholders, and stakeholders up at the top, as opposed to a bunch of coffee-cup holders (us) down at the bottom.

Under the right (read: wrong) circumstances, that'd could have made you a journalist at the event, not a blogger. And what you wrote *would* have been different.

Nevertheless, Jeneane, I did feel somewhat team-y. I spent a few hours in the Boston Globe space (a big, open area with tables in the media tent adjacent to the Fleet) because they had cabled ethernet, tables, chairs and snacks. Also, it was interesting to watch journalists ply their trade. I feel loyalty to Teresa Hanifin, editor of the Boston.com site (even though she didn't edit my stuff) because, well, I like her. And I did notice that I was tweaking what I was writing for my imagined boston.com readers as opposed to joho readers. A "crap" became "poop," (or some such) and I skipped some stuff that I thought required some joho background. I can't even remember what I changed, but I know I did adjust to suit the imaginary readership.

As far as I can tell, that doesn't yet make me a journalist.

And, of course, I also am a journalist in at least one of the mainstream, non-controversial senses: I write straightforward articles for magazines. I've done that for 30 years. But I've never been a reporter.

Anyway...