Is blogging together being like Iceland?

[... before I get to the topic, ... a note for this blog's Annals of Outrageous Hypocrisy. It’s the usual suspect, I’m afraid, Guardian News and Media (GNM). Any number of us who have commented on blogs on The Guardian’s website in recent years have seen our posts deleted when they support -- or [...]

A prize-winning journalist becomes the latest casualty of free-speech suppression at Guardian News & Media

To many if not most readers of this blog, big business is boring. Small business is boring. Management is boring. Journalism is rather boring. . . And I have, by now, written so many posts on the subject of irrational and self-destructive censorship by editors and moderators at Guardian News & Media that that’s almost [...]

We few, we happy few … bloggers vs. The Guardian (which has a lesson to learn from computer geeks)

Dear Comrades, including those of you who once blogged with me on the books site of The Guardian – whether or not we’re still on speaking terms,
…The signs point to a victory over Goliath. . . Yes, we few, we happy band of bloggers … have won, by refusing to let that newspaper shut us [...]

Bloggers can be choosers

In today’s Independent, the columnist Mary Dejevsky reveals herself as yet another print journalist who cannot understand that any newspaper postponing its reinvention from top to toe is begging to disappear down a crack of Tolkien’s Mount Doom. Icily, she mocks leading American papers like The Washington Post for losing money in early experiments in [...]

Flashing The Guardian — a books bloggers’ rebellion

[ This piece was originally published on Philip Hall’s/@ISA’s Xuitlacoche blog on the 3rd of February as an experiment in flash blogging. I’d recommend going there for the scintillating comment thread that followed. ]

Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation
When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – [...]

Acciaccature heard elsewhere

Not every acciaccatura originates in this spot . . . (ahem).
Tuesday’s posting, Pixels in the wind: traditional publishing vs. the blogosphere (part 2), mentions attempts in certain quarters to blame the financial crisis for the commercialisation of book publishing. This isn’t just untrue but unnecessary. See the quotations of writers and publishers at the bottom [...]

How oral culture is turning editors into pterodactyls

I’ve had editors on the brain since this post of alarming’s last Sunday:
[T]he comment from the modbots chez GU warning us to refrain from mentioning Mr. Swords may well have been a wind-up but parallax has just been deleted […] for mentioning him in connection with this Gaelic bit of verse.
I’m extremely anti the concept [...]

What did The Guardian censor today?

The BaronCharlus said about two brief mentions of new posts on this site, including Since when was a newspaper strictly a mercantilist tool? that were deleted after less than an hour on The Guardian’s books blog yesterday,
You’re definitely being censored (assuming your ‘moderated’ post wasn’t just off-topic swearing).

Oh I can swear with [...]

Since when was a newspaper strictly a mercantilist tool?

No one has yet appeared on this site to object to more than one of us remarking that The Guardian has been behaving as if it’s just a business, with no purpose other than to make a profit.
Does no one remember that it’s a newspaper still supposedly charged with the responsibilities of The Fourth Estate? [...]

Postscript to Censorship at The Guardian (part 2)

There’s been an unfortunate confusion of categories in conversations about posts made to vaporise on the Guardian’s books blog. For one group of blogging comrades, it’s all about GU banning particular bloggers.
At the risk of boring careful readers of earlier posts witless, by repetition, . . . the problem I’m most disturbed by is [...]