B-ology

Saturday, 12th May 2007

A typically thoughtful post from Norm Geras on the changing face of the blogging world. To be frank, I don't think Oliver Kamm's objections are worth bothering with - life is too short - but Norm has answered them in his usual courteous style. As he points out, the fact that media organisations are moving into the blogging realm is a sign that the phenomenon must have something going for it. He adds one other observation about the establishment media's embrace of the on-line world:

There was and is, however, a drawback to their getting in on it: which is that the space they come to occupy on the terrain of blogging they also transform just by that very act. In integrating this space into their own operation they make it part of whatever media organization they are, which is something else than the free space of the blogosphere.

Does that mean that my site is no longer part of the "free space" either? I guess not, although I honestly don't feel I'm going about it any differently so far. Just to spell things out (which I should have done earlier): I don't have to submit posts for approval, and the only communication I've had with the office so far is to sort out technical wrinkles. No one has discussed an editorial line with me, but I'm assuming I'm free to disagree with anything that appears in the magazine or over at the Coffee House. Is self-censorship going to kick in? I guess it's bound to, although I'm not sure things were all that different on the old site. I'm a freelance journalist, so I've always had to consider whether it's worth burning bridges with particular organisations. (I can think of one example where that's happened, but I'd better keep the details to myself.)

Enough of the sermonizing. As I've already said, we'll see what happens next time Andrew Roberts publishes another of his Spectator diaries.