Tom Mangan’s home page

I’ve decided “Blogging” isn’t sexy enough, so I’m titling my talk as follows: “The Future Doesn’t Need Us: Weblogs and the End of Editing as We’ve Known It.”

Now, to get busy amassing facts to back up my conclusion. Assistance along these lines is welcome.

Did you know the Poynter site has been taking these submissions since September 2002? Neither did I.

It will be much like 2003.

And not one of them is a blog. Somebody alert the InstaPundit!

From a New York Times story the other day.

With more American households going to broadband, faster Internet connections are changing the movie, music, telephone, computer and cable businesses.

Nothing about newspapers; whew.

(Link via Fimoculous; thanks to Sheila for pointing the site out.)

I happened across this encouraging tidbit while reading an accounting of 10 lesser-noted trends of 2003:

2. The U.S. began to massively export white-collar jobs. Despite the high productivity of America’s 130 million employed workers, companies of all kinds discovered that they could get many jobs done for less money overseas. This was particularly true of service jobs, where one of the main requirements is mastery of English. The U.S. has no monopoly on Shakespeare’s tongue, so American managers — in fields as varied as computer programming, insurance and management consulting — shifted millions of jobs to English-speaking but lower paying India, Ireland, and various countries of the Caribbean, among others.

Emphasis mine. We need to start thinking of reasons why people in India and Ireland can’t do our jobs, and to get really noisy about what we find out (or stay really quiet, depending on our conclusions).

It’s here.

And guess who’s in the first set of seminars, Thursday, March 18, at 9:30 a.m.? Yours truly, naturally. And please no groaning at the title of a competing seminar: “Headlines as Poetry.” We have to be nice about this because the presenter is Chris Wienandt of the Dallas Morning News, one of the prime planners of the conference.

So now I’m going to have to start thinking about what I’m going to say at this thing. Here’s my working outline:

History of blogs, in which I take credit for being the blogging pioneer nobody ever heard of.

Blogging terminology, in which I explain such matters as blogrolling, Instalanches and the blogosphere.

Why blogs matter, in which I tell why editors should care about blogs, which are expressly editor-free zones; required mention of the name of Howard Dean and his “He Gets It!” brigades.

Which blogs matter, in which I praise my favorite blogs and trash the rest.

How to start a blog, in which I explain that starting one is as easy as as few keystrokes, but stopping is no more difficult than, say, kicking a 13-year heroin habit.

How to blog and stay employed, in which I outline my code of conduct and urge others to follow, unless they have some peculiar affection for starvation.

How to make sure one’s blog doesn’t suck, in which I say, “grab a topic, any topic, so long as it it’s not you.”

Blogging hype vs. blogging reality, in which I separate the wheat from the … sorry, not going there.

Please feel free to add comments and suggestions. I have 90 minutes to fill so there should be plenty of room for your contributions.

USA Today raves on the wonders of political blogs, which are, of course, transforming political journalism as we know it and heralding a new dawn of citizen democracy.

For future reference I’ll call this a Mister Jones Story, in honor of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” which describes a reporter covering the counterculture of the 1960s, trying to describe something incomprehensible to those who do not participate. The line goes, “you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?”

OK, so I have this perverse tendency — when I see a balloon, I don’t think, “”wow, check out that colorful orb bouncing on the breeze.” I think, “where did I leave my needle?” I tend to have allergic reactions to hype, even when it hypes stuff near and dear to me. So with that context in mind, I offer:

Blogging: a reality check

Or, what the hypesters never tell you.

1) Blogging is not free. It has a cost, paid out in time spent on things that don’t get done because the blogger is busy typing and linking. Every minute doing this is a minute not doing something else, whether it’s tending to their kids or devising strategies for world peace. (Yeah, I realize I’m essentially saying time spent gardening is time not spent advancing the cause of humanity … but bear with me).

2) Blogging is not easy to do well. It’s a lot like work: the rewards reflect the effort, talent and time devoted to the blog, combined with the interest in the subject matter. You need all four for a blog to get any traction.

3) Blogging is lonely. You can spend hours crafting the perfect post and get no response. Or you can spend 15 seconds linking to “what were your favorite songs this year” and get an-all day debate. There’s no telling what will catch people’s fancy, and this tends to test your sanity.

4) Blogging is an art form — with all the suffering that implies. The dedicated blogger is like the artist who cannot imagine doing anything else. Days, weeks, months and years are devoted to fretting over the tiniest details, and there’s a fair chance that one’s greatest achievements will be misunderstood or ignored.

Well, that’s a good start. I’m all for everybody starting blogs and devoting their lives to them, but they have to know blogging is not all sweetness and glory. It’s isolation, frustration, aggravation — and a dozen other annoyances that cause people to abandon their blogs after the glow wears off.

Hype and anti-hype aside, blogging is worth doing well, it’s just not especially easy to do well.

Testy Copy Editors discuss writing and reporting on the side. Seems obvious but people make me wonder sometimes: Everybody who gets paid to change other people’s writing should be doing some writing of their own, preferably for an audience. (File under: another reason why all you lurkers out there oughta be blogging. The more you write, the more you identify with other people who write, and the better chance you have to make constructive changes to their copy vs. reflexive responses to your pet peeves.)

Updates from editor people’s blogs:

Newsdesigner on
the New York Times Magazine’s annual "people who died" issue.

Mondo Winkie describes
of those moments that always seem to happen to him. Excerpt:

“Nah, I’m just a peon,” Advance Guy replies.

“Peon,” says large, one-eyed lady, “does that mean you want me to pee on
you?”

“I would hope you wouldn’t,” Advance Guy says nervously.

Infomaniac points to Media
Mayhem, a new St. Louis media blog; a highlight:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch military cheerleader Harry Levin has requested readers
submit their suggestions for a ” word that would generically define military
servicemen and women. The Time magazine Man of the Year award prompted Levin
to put out the call. Levin took exception to Time casting all military personnel
as “soldiers.” The appropriate term should be “a pithy and punchy word –
one short enough to nestle comfortably in a single-column headline — to cover
everybody in all four branches of the service,” Levin wrote in his Saturday
column. I’m assuming Levin is looking for a bit of 21st-Century jingoism,
sufficiently imbued with a video-game vision of war. How about an acronym
lik e DOF, for Defenders of Freedom. I can see the headlines now: 25 DOFs
Killed in Roadside Bombing; or DOF Amputees Flood Walter Reed.

Of course, a perfectly suited “pithy and punchy” word already defines members
of the armed services — GIs. A GI, accord ing to the American Heritage Dictionary,
is an “enlisted person or veteran of any of the U.S. armed forces.” The acronym
is an abbreviation for government issue. Originally, though, GI stood for
galvinized iron, the stuff from which gar ba ge cans used to be forged. It
came to represent men who swallow garbage and develop skins of iron.

Maybe Levin would object to reissuing GI for the Iraqi war because it excludes
officers. Like all wars, however, the grunts do the most fighting and dying.
Back in the “Good War,” GIs coined another phrase based on reality — SNAFU.
The acronym stands for situation normal, all fucked up.

There’s no need to fashion any new words for this war. Some things never
change.

Off-topic
links to a story that comes closer to the definition of irony: a candle causing
a fire in the home of the deputy fire chief. Comment: I’m not sure this is really
irony; otherwise every fire that burns down the home of a firefighter would
be ironic. Irony as I understand it means an outcome that is the opposite of
intent. There has to be an expressed intent for an ironic outcome; if the deputy
fire chief had made some fire-prevention precaution that accidentally caused
the house to burn down, that would be truly ironic.

Maud Newton links to
the story of a guy who made a living suing newspapers, and muses on the
connection
between drinking and good writing.

Side Salad laments
the Tampa Bay Bucs’ collapse.

It wasn’t Snoopy who took him out; most likely it was ground fire, according to this summary at kuro5hin.org. A long read but a fascinating look at aerial combat during World War I.

Blanp rails yet again on people’s lopsided notions of “good” headlines.

My favorite riposte:

Nearly all winners in headline contests are puns. Usually, they aren

It really happened, snopes.com says. A spontaneous ceace fire erupted, gifts were exchanged, good cheer was spread about. Then a couple days later the previously scheduled bloodbath resumed.

Except for the wheezing and hacking.

I was warned of grievous bodily harm if I even thought of taking pictures of a certain someone in this condition, so no Christmas pix this year.

“Cry of a Tiny Babe,” by Bruce Cockburn

Mary grows a child without the help of a man
Joseph get upset because he doesn’t understand

Angel comes to Joseph in a powerful dream
Says "God did this and you’re part of his scheme"
Joseph comes to Mary with his hat in his hand
Says "forgive me I thought you’d been with some other man"
She says "what if I had been - but I wasn’t anyway and guess what

I felt the baby kick today"

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

The child is born in the fullness of time
Three wise astrologers take note of the signs
Come to pay their respects to the fragile little king
Get pretty close to wrecking everything
‘Cause the governing body of the whole land

Is that of Herod, a paranoid man
Who when he hears there’s a baby born King of the Jews
Sends death squads to kill all male children under two
But that same bright angel warns the parents in a dream
And they head out for the border and get away clean

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time
In the cry of a tiny babe

There are others who know about this miracle birth
The humblest of people catch a glimpse of their worth
For it isn’t to the palace that the Christ child comes
But to shepherds and street people, hookers and bums
And the message is clear if you’ve got ears to hear
That forgiveness is given for your guilt and your fear

It’s a Christmas gift you don’t have to buy
There’s a future shining in a baby’s eyes

Like a stone on the surface of a still river
Driving the ripples on forever
Redemption rips through the surface of time

In the cry of a tiny babe

It was about 4:30 this afternoon and we were getting near the end of the do-four-days’-work-in-three routine that we always do three times a year, every year, for the privilege of not having to work on the actual holidays, when Michele, one of our veteran part-timers who was filling in, sent a message to everyone one the desk that went roughly like this:

I could be here or I could be in a church full of unfamiliar faces. I’m happier here with all my friends on Christmas Eve.

It’s a paraphrase but that’s how I remember it. A nice thought to have in one’s brain on the ride home.

The Testy Copy Editors are taking them. And sharing timeless laments.

Why can’t we persuade the reporters that the best word for “said” is “said.”

For a guide to holiday myths. For instance:

“Xmas” is a modern abbreviation that is disrespectful for “taking the Christ out of Christmas.” (The first letter in the Greek word for Christ is chi, which looks like an X in our alphabet. So, you get Xmas and sometimes even Xian.)

He sent me a curmudegeonly Christmas card.

(And Thanks to Jeff, another Tampa Tribber who sent get-well greetings.)