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 [...]

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 [...]

A serendipitous postscript to: Bruce Chatwin, blogging pioneer

A good reporter thinking in what couldn’t be deemed his finest hour was complaining the other day that the net has killed serendipity. To that I say, stuff and nonsense. The fact is, it’s alive and well and has only done a bit of shape-shifting — just as Serendip, the inspiration for that gorgeous word, [...]

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 [...]

Is blogging ultimately the friend of war or peace?

My most disappointing conclusion from running this eight month-old experiment in blogging? It’s that we human beings appear to find fighting more enjoyable than sparkling debate and friendly disagreement.
Never mind that in answering a question about what he or she would do as a live, fully clothed substitute for a statue in the One & [...]

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 [...]