Letters to the Editor

• Paul in KY:

  [Read the article: Drudge and the Politico -- poisonously joined at the hip]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  You're totally right about proofing your own work (you can check out most of my posts & find typos). I am surprised though that you don't have some other person take a look at your post prior to it going out into the ether. Since, I assume, you get some form of compensation for this I would have thought Salon (or somebody) would require someone other than you to proof it just for typos.

  The times I guest blogged at Salon before moving my blog here, I would send my posts to an editor to be corrected before being posted. I hated it. And I often post outside of normal business hours -- early in the morning, later at night, on the weekends - when nobody is around to edit. One of the benefits of blogging is the instantaneous nature of it -- you can enter the discussion of events as they unfold every day, day to day.

  I hated having by posts sit in a queue, waiting for someone to clean it all up. One of the items I negotiated for when I moved here was that I would be able immediately to post without any editorial intervention of any kind. Sometimes, Salon editors correct typos when they see them after the post is up, but I vastly prefer immediately posting combined with corrections from readers (which are always comprehensive and fast) over waiting hours for a post to be read by an editor just to ensure that is never a stray typo.

  Permalink Tuesday, March 27, 2007 08:56 AM

• Bill H:

  [Read the article: Drudge and the Politico -- poisonously joined at the hip]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  You used to comment regularly on the political impact of ongoing events in Washington, and particularly on the legal and constitutional ramifications thereof. Since your move to Salon your posts are more often than not merely a lengthy diatribe about how awful the media is.

  I really never cease to be amazed at comments like this. Aside the multiple factual inaccuracies on which the comment is premised -- as others pointed out, I have always written just as extensively about media issues from the time I began blogging and have written extensively about all sorts of "legal and constitutional" issues even in the last two weeks alone -- comments like this reflect a total lack of understanding of what blogging is about.

  I write about the topics that are interesting to me, that I think are important, and that I think I have something worthwhile to say. That is what drives my blogging choices. Paul's description above is absolutely correct.

  But people who complain about topic choices on blogs seem to think that bloggers have some sort of obligation to select topics that will entertain and interest them - as though I am going to refrain from writing about topics that I think are important because Bill H. says that he isn't entertained by them. I honestly find that bizarre. I read a lot of blogs, and even my favorite bloggers periodically write about topics I'm not interested in. I simply skip those posts, and I would never dream of writing to them to tell them to stop talking about that topic, since they obviously think that it's worthy of their attention.

  Independetly, I find it baffling that someone could think that the ways in which our national media frame and discuss political issues is some sort of irrelevant, side point. Few things are more responsible for the heinous political developments in our country than that topic. It's virtually impossible to achieve any change without addressing and working on that problem.

  There are plenty of blogs that tend to confine themselves to abstract legal discussions. I even read some of them. So if that is what someone wants, they can easily find what they're looking for, and that seems a much better use of time than coming here and complaining about the topic choices.

  Permalink Tuesday, March 27, 2007 09:14 AM