TIME WARP ON WNYC: WHAT IS A BLOG?

I just finished listening to a radio segment on my beloved Leonard Lopate Show about Sarah Boxer’s new book: Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web but I have to say: I feel like I was in some kind of WEIRD TIME WARP.

What are blogs?

Who reads them?

Do those bloggers use a special language?

Does “self publishing” mean the standards are low?

TIME WARP. TIME WARP. What year is this? 2002? 2003?

Maybe the segment had that feeling because Lopate was purposely playing dumb and being real gee whiz about the whole thing. Obviously he doesn’t read blogs and he thinks they’re some kind of crazy, new-fangled thing. (Note: I am a HUGE Leonard Lopate Fan.)

Lopate interviewed Sarah Boxer, who edited a book of blogs worth noting. This is meant to be the go-to book about blogging. The it-book. The look-book . I haven’t looked at the book but a quick peek at the Amazon blurb revealed that a few of the bloggers are actually real journalists. And that must mean they have good blogs. Right? Well, the book is edited by a real journalist with STANDARDS.

Talk about a traditional media bias.

On the other hand, Boxer included Johnny I Hardly Knew You, a real live blogger-poet, who sounds eccentric, interesting, erudite, creative. At one point in the show someone asked, “Are there poetry blogs?” And Boxer said, “I don’t know…” I almost fell out of my seat (as I was blogging the show).

I mean, there are, like, so many excellent poetry blogs.

Lopate’s guests spent a good bit of time talking about how bloggers use acronyms. Not one of the 50 or so bloggers I read use acronyms. And I’m sure that barely one of the 50 or so bloggers I read are in Boxer’s book.

Here’s how it works: a New York Times writer bestows credibility on blogs by selecting William Saffire’s and Alex Ross’s blog. Nothing wrong (and lots right) about Alex Ross (The Rest is Noise). But these are late adapters who started blogging after being successful journalists.

Yeesh. I hate when a New York Times writer decides to get on board with something like this and gets it all wrong or partly wrong or maybe partly right but they act like this is the DEFINITIVE BOOK ON THE SUBJECT.

Yeesh.

6 thoughts on “TIME WARP ON WNYC: WHAT IS A BLOG?”

  1. i’m generally a lopate fan, and i didn’t hear this segment, but myopia or a refusal to accept change in media patterns can be an embarrassing affliction.

  2. I didn’t sense the time warp thing that everyone is referring to.
    I can’t say that Leonard’s interview was on the top 10 list but he knows how to conduct a decent interview no matter what the subject is. Frankly, I don’t think the Blog thing interested him all that much and he does a much better interview when he is engaged with the person and their subject. In this case.. he wasn’t and it showed but I can’t sling arrows at someone who is all around the best interview on NPR. (In my humble opinion)

  3. What happened Smart Mom? There was a discussion of Blogs and your name did not come up? Don’t be so cross. There is a sizable segment of the population that reads other mediums besides blogs. In the history of media – blogs are still pretty new and evolving.

  4. That is the exact reaction I had when I was listening. I even said to my husband, “shouldn’t this have aired 5 years ago?” It was definitely one of the strangest segments I’ve heard.

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