It’s not exactly prime time, but the post on The Art of Blogging About Art in the Art Beat blog (not to be confused with the ArtsBeat blog) of public television’s “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” features CultureGrrl (along with the LA Times‘ Culture Monster and the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet). CultureGrrl had the distinction of being the only single-author blog in the bunch.
One passage from my interview with NewsHour’s Chris Amico reflects a concern that’s been much on my mind of late—the uneasy relationship between blogging and mainstream-media work:
Bouncing between paper and blog means a constant swapping of voice:
“Everything has to be short, punchy and to the point” on the blog, she
[me] said. “In some ways it’s not been for the good. I used to do a lot of
long, thoughtful pieces and that has somewhat gone by the wayside.“In the blog I tend to be very feisty, very pointed, maybe a little
irritating sometimes—provocative, I should say—and in the [Wall Street] Journal
it might be more straightforward, fact-driven criticism.”
Although I didn’t mention this to Chris, blogging has the potential to preempt long-form pieces in even more insidious ways. On the blog, I’m aggressively (some would say, obnoxiously) opinionated, and everyone, including potential sources, knows my strong feelings on certain hot-button issues—deaccessioning, cultural-property controversies, the Barnes move, the proposed MoMA/Hines tower, to name just a few. What happens if Lee Rosenbaum wants to do a mainstream-media piece on a CultureGrrl topic, and needs people on all sides to pick up the phone?
What has saved me (for the most part) from being shunned by sources who already know my views is their respect for my serious, longstanding journalistic credentials and my track record for fair, accurate reporting in both genres. This continued ability to get access generally applies to my feisty blog writing as well as to my tamer mainstream forays. People are willing to take their chances with me and my blog in part because CultureGrrl has Google power (prominence in searches) and is very widely read by movers-and-shakers in the field. It matters.
The praise that I cherish most comes from those who have been on the receiving end of my harsh critiques—most recently, a note e-mailed to me by someone on the opposite side of one hot-button issue:
While I do not always agree with your point of view, you do get the
facts straight and you write well.
That writer ended by inviting me to see him, to discuss things further. For me, that’s as good as it gets.
But getting back to the Art Beat post—as CultureGrrl readers know, I’m not quite as indifferent to trying to support myself by blogging as Chris suggests. The chapter that most interests me in Say Everything, the new book by Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg (which inspired Chris’ art-blogging report) is titled, “Blogging for Bucks.” A close second is the chapter related to the theme of THIS post—“Journalists vs. Bloggers.”
Can we all get along? And can these somewhat conflicting activities peacefully co-exist in one writer? It’s still a work in progress.