Gatekeepers!
Once again I'm going to risk redundancy by mentioning that Lileks has another great Bleat on the blogging, old media/new media topic. His ideal paper would be mine as well:
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it’s all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin “I am smoking in such a provocative fashion” Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.Who wouldn’t buy that paper? Who wouldn’t want to read it? Who wouldn’t climb over their mother to be in it?
By the way, here's the Boston Globe article, the "research" for which sparked the bleat. As Reynolds and Sullivan point out, Alex Beam, Professional Columnist, somehow failed to grasp that Bjorn Staerk's "I love Stalin!" page was an April Fool's joke. It is simply beyond my power to imagine what it would be like to be that dim.
Providing the url to Lileks's blog was another hare-brained credibility-undermining mistake: any reader who follows that link will instantly realize that, compared to Lileks, Beam couldn't write himself out of paper bag. And that Lileks "scooped" Beam by writing a better column about Beam's own column before it was even published. That sort of thing is only possible in the blogosphere. The blog people win this one.
(Beam, like most professional journalists writing about the blog phenom., only cites other pro-journalists. But I must point out that Sullivan does it, too: he mentions, but does not provide a link to, Bjorn Staerk's page, for instance. Say what you want about Lileks, he's no filthy gatekeeper.)
UPDATE: The VodkaPundit piles on.
Posted by Dr. Frank at April 2, 2002 10:40 AM | TrackBack