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 [...]

Platform 9¾ at the media junction

[ with apologies to H. Potter and J.K. Rowling]
It’s been hot where I am, for most of the last week – blisteringly, sinfully, mind-numbingly hot. But is only weather to blame for the last thread here and its cousin on @ISA’s site seeming not merely Dali-esque but downright fantastic?
As I swelter, [...]

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 [...]

Old print media and their trained, fact-sniffing noses

There are now an amazing number of journalists, about 850, serving the Guardian’s online industry, with little or nothing to show for it.

It’s been years since reading a tally took me so close to needing emergency resuscitation. If Donald Trelford, a former editor of The Observer, had mentioned a number one-tenth the size in writing [...]

As goes blogging, so goes literature … or, … Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

Mary Roach on Bill Streever’s Cold in last Sunday’s lead review in The New York Times:

Streever himself is a scientist, both by degree and paycheck, but writing for journals hasn’t muddied his style. Phalaropes, he writes, “swim in tight circles, their heads bobbing as if connected to their feet.” […] He sculptures lucid [...]

Blogger-hatred – Indie journalists über alles – A beauty in love with blood-and-gore

This collection of clips supports positions taken and points made in these recent entries on this blog: The rafts of the unwelcoming print journos; Stick to your Polish Joseph Conrad! –Whoa Cleopatra! ; and Ruth Padel and the presentation of intelligent pulchritude in everyday life .
LOATHING BLOGGERS
Referring to January’s baffling announcement by a respected Old [...]

The rafts of the unwelcoming print journos

When in July of 1816 a crude raft, constructed in haste, was found floating off the coast of Mauritania in West Africa, a terrible story began to emerge, piece by grisly piece. A French frigate, the Méduse, had run aground. Of the four hundred-odd people sailing on it, a hundred and forty-seven were squeezed [...]

Editors, editing and infant mortality

Earlier this week, three closely related subjects swam into focus together, on my mental screen:
* Complaints about unedited or poorly edited books, a species of moan that has begun to be an anachronistic cliché — in this case, by a New York Times reviewer grumbling about the autobiography of someone called Russell Brand:
In the [...]

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 – [...]

Editors begone!

Here is everyone’s chance to show me up as a shamefully inept Googler. Mulling over a recent post on the future of editors as oral culture makes a revolutionary comeback, I realised that I knew nothing definite about the history of editing as a profession. I was thinking of the very beginning, centuries before Yeats’ [...]