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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Whither blogging — and acciaccature?

. . . or, do I really mean, where are these still tentative splinter-blogs that broke away from the mercantilist Guardian going? (see the list on the right hand column of this page)
One effect of the defections that I most certainly didn’t anticipate is that traffic for concentrated discussion of serious subjects on all sites, [...]

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 – [...]

Hands off that haiku, that German painting, please

Annotations for a photograph of a painting in a newspaper article about art from the time of two Germanys have reminded me of the irritating inverse relationship between, on the one hand, the quantity of erudite commentary on art and literature — and on the other, the artistic worth of its subjects, or the degree [...]