There’s a fascinating and thoughtful article on “Why I Blog” by Andrew Sullivan, a senior editor of the Atlantic. (thanks Publishing Coach)
Sullivan’s thoughts on how blogs are an emerging literary form all their own are fascinating. Particularly interesting to me is his contrast between blogging and what he refers to below as “the alternative” and I call “old era publishing”:
“I knew firsthand what the alternative meant. I’d edited a weekly print magazine, The New Republic, for five years, and written countless columns and essays for a variety of traditional outlets. And in all this, I’d often chafed, as most writers do, at the endless delays, revisions, office politics, editorial fights, and last-minute cuts for space that dead-tree publishing entails. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in the early days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a narcotic.
“It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all these troubles evaporated.
“Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally unstable than any colleague.
“Again, it’s hard to overrate how different this is….”
Different, yes. That’s why I call blogging part of New Era Publishing. Andrew Sullivan’s article points out the man facets of it all. Read his article, and ponder: What will you do with this new opportunity?
Andrew Sullivan, an Atlantic senior editor, blogs at
www.andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com (And share your own thoughts below.)
Posted By: Pam Perry
Tuesday, October 21st 2008 at 11:38PM
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