Archives for September 6, 2006

– Ann Althouse liveblogged Katie Couric’s debut on the CBS Evening News. The only time I ever watch network newscasts is when I’m visiting my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., so I can’t swear that the divine Ms. Althouse got it right, but her account sure sounds plausible:

Next, there’s a segment called “freeSpeech.” Not “free speech” or “Free Speech” or “freespeech” or “Freespeech.” “freeSpeech.” Get it right.

By their taste ye shall know them.

– Ms. pretty dumb things watched the Emmy Awards on TV, and posted this deadly description of the current appearance of Charlie’s Angels:

Kate Jackson’s eyes no longer match; one is slightly rounded, the other oddly triangular. Farrah Fawcett’s ever-slimming nose is dwindling to a Michelle Pfeiffer/Michael Jackson slenderness. Jaclyn Smith’s face has a kind of waxed-fruit fecundity; there is a strange immobility to her shiny, full features, as if she has been sculpted by the masters at Madame Tussaud’s. Each of them have that taut fixed expression that registers as something between mild surprise and total enlightenment. Each of them has been nipped, poked, tucked, implanted and tweaked within an inch of their lives.

Like the song says, aren’t you glad you’re you?

As everyone in the blogosphere now knows or soon will, The New Republic shut down Lee Siegel’s blog last week when its editors caught him engaging in “sock-puppetry,” which is blogtalk for posting comments to your own blog under a phony name. (Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, has posted a link-rich summary of the imbroglio.) Siegel has also been “suspended” from writing for TNR, and it’s widely expected that in due course he’ll be terminated.

The real scandal, of course, is that TNR deigned to publish so clueless a blowhard in the first place. But since Siegel’s blog has vanished into the memory hole, it strikes me that instead of dancing on his grave, we might do better to pause for a moment and consider the larger implications of what happened to him.

Having recently beat up on the old media
for their failure to come to terms with blogging, I don’t care to whip that horse again. The good news is that The New Republic is only one of a growing number of newspapers and magazines that have launched institutional blogs. The bad news is that most of them are mediocre. (The Boston Globe‘s Exhibitionist is a noteworthy exception to the rule.) That’s predictable, since the very idea of an institutional blog is a contradiction in terms. The best blogs are idiosyncratic, unmediated expressions of an individual sensibility, a notion which tends to make old-media executives squirm, so much so that many print-media publications refuse to let their employees blog.

I think that’s a mistake. In fact, I think editors and reporters should be encouraged to blog independently of the publications for which they work. Frank Wilson, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s book-review editor, also blogs at Books, Inq. Not only is his blog worth reading in its own right, but frank postings like this one help strip away the mystery from the Inquirer‘s editorial decision-making processes. Such transparency is a special virtue of blogging, and one of the most valuable lessons the new media can teach the old media.

Speaking of transparency, The New Republic has had nothing further to say about Lee Siegel since its three-sentence announcement of his suspension. I hope (and expect) that the magazine’s editors will be more forthcoming about the matter in the near future. On the other hand, I give them full credit for acting so unhesitatingly and unequivocally to punish Siegel for an offense of whose very existence many middle-aged editors are doubtless unaware. If blogging is journalism–as I believe it is–then bloggers, be they institutional or independent, should be held to the same standards of professional conduct as the old-media types they love to rake over the coals.

By pulling the plug on Lee Siegel’s blog, the editors of The New Republic showed that they take blogging seriously. That’s a big step in the right direction.

UPDATE: The New York Times found Siegel’s suspension sufficiently noteworthy to run a news story about it.

“A book is not a thing of one sitting, like a poem, but a longish thing which takes time and energy, and since it takes skill, too, the first effort or maybe the second may not find a market. A writer should not think he is bad, or finished, if this happens, and of course writers with real drive will not. Every failure teaches something. You should have the feeling, as every experienced writer has, that there are more ideas where that one came from, more strength where the first strength came from, and that you are inexhaustible as long as you are alive. This requires an optimistic turn of mind, to say the least, and if you don’t have it by nature, it has to be created artificially. You have to talk yourself into it sometimes.”

Patricia Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (courtesy of Kate’s Book Blog)

A number of bloggers linked to the teaser to “Serendipity, R.I.P.,” my “Sightings” column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, without having read the whole thing. This extended excerpt may help to clear up the resulting confusion. The occasion for the column was the announcement that Tower Records is filing for bankruptcy:

Imagine a world without record stores. What will it be like? How will it affect the way we experience music?

The biggest change will be in the way we shop. People who purchase music online typically come to a “store” looking for a specific song or album, buy it, then depart. People who purchase music at deep-catalog record stores, by contrast, typically spend a fair amount of time browsing, and thus are more likely to buy additional CDs on impulse–including some of whose existence they may not previously have been aware. Such serendipitous discoveries are a key aspect of the enduring appeal of brick-and-mortar retailing. The old joke about Strand Book Store, New York City’s best-known seller of used books, was that while it never had the book you were looking for, you always went home with five others you couldn’t resist. (The store’s slogan is “18 miles of books.”) I can’t begin to count the number of good books I’ve bought at the Strand simply because they looked interesting.

On the other hand, I can’t remember the last time I shopped at the Strand: I now buy most of my books and all my CDs online. Not only is it more convenient, but I can get exactly what I want, whenever I want it. What I can’t do is wander up and down the aisles, casually running my eyes along the shelves in search of pleasant surprises. In cyberspace there are no aisles or shelves, just pages viewed one at a time.

Not only does online buying put an end to browsing, but it also eliminates the practice known to booksellers as “hand-selling.” Think of Championship Vinyl, the fictional record store portrayed in the movie High Fidelity, whose know-it-all clerks (“Do we look like the kind of store that sells