...happy new year
may we all
have our hopes
our will to try
if we don’t
we might as well
lay down and die
you and I
I have visited WD every day, two or three times a day, for years. I have always read the good posts (left, right, in-between) and ignored the trolls. I've learnt much. Margo, your a helluva lady ... "We shall overcome". And we (and you) will. All the trials. All the tribulations. All the petty nastiness. G'day: Sadly Margo is thinking of saying goodbye to WD
The Blog, The Press, The Media: Is Blogging Dead?
Good Question, eh? W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand, noted: What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten and replaced by a new dish.
The Small Press Center for independent publishing is hosting their eighteenth annual Independent and Small Press Book Fair this weekend, December 3rd and 4th in New York City. Among the events will be a panel discussion called “Is Blogging Dead?”
Harry Reasoner makes me smile:
Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world...
If you're a good journalist, what you do is live a lot of things vicariously, and report them for other people who want to live vicariously.
• Has blogging lost its sexy edge? [According to Weingarten, a Los Angeles resident, Wolfe and his contemporaries recognized one salient fact of life in the sixties: the traditional tools of reporting would be inadequate to chronicle the tremendous cultural and social changes of the era. War, assassination, rock, drugs, hippies, Yippies, Nixon: how could a traditional just-the-facts reporter dare to provide a neat and symmetrical order to such chaos? He couldn't, really. He needed to offer perspective instead, to form opinions and take sides. He needed to sort through current events, as tumultuous as they were, and tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn't, stories about the way life was being lived ... and what it all meant to us. The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight ; 'New Journalists': They gave readers more, not less ]
• · The other day, the Wall Street Journal ran a story that adds fresh evidence to an intriguing trend described in some detail in THE NUMBER: how so-called “life planning” has begun to reshape the language and the practice of traditional financial planning. THE NUMBER: life planning ; Shrinking Dollars
• · · There should be a book titled "How News Is Made," a book that could be for journalism what "The Jungle" was to the meatpacking industry. My version would offer no conspiracy theory, but I'd point out the preponderance of sloppiness and lazy thinking coupled with a herd mentality, most especially in business journalism. How News is Made ; Chattering oracles are telling us that newspapers will die soon, as the Internet takes over If Old Journalism Dies . . .
• · · · P2P: good for the backlist, not good for best-sellers ; One of the favourite games of literary people is that of best first lines The deepest rooted of last lines is the childhood one: And they all lived happily ever after... The end. At last
• · · · · Parables about famous, infamous, and anonymous European moral actors at moments of decision Portable Words ; Tim Worstall's entertaining new anthology of web writers, 2005 - Blogged, puts the best into a book Blogbuster ; Revolutions don't usually work out quite as planned. And that's what's happening now in the technology world with blogs. They are every bit as important as their boosters said they would be. But in an entirely different way. While there are now as many tech blogs as stars in the sky, only a tiny fraction of them matter
• · · · · · The word is out. Sex does not sell, at least in terms of government funding Research is a sex-free zone ; Keyboard Shortcuts 10 Things Every New Mac Owner Should Know