the kicker

Blog Gridlock!

The eminently quotable Michael Kinsley has a nice piece, in this week’s Time, about blog gridlock (a topic we explore in detail, by the way, in...
November 21, 2008

The eminently quotable Michael Kinsley has a nice piece, in this week’s Time, about blog gridlock (a topic we explore in detail, by the way, in the current issue of the magazine). Among Kinsley’s Potent Quotables:

But aggregation has become a hall of mirrors. “Did you see Romenesko this morning? Yeah, very interesting. He’s got a link to a piece in LA Observed that links to a column on the London Times website where this guy says that a Russian blogger is saying that Obama will make Sarah Palin Secretary of State.”



“Wow. Sounds true. Where did the Russian guy get it?”



“He says it was in Romenesko.”

And:

The opportunity for us all to express an opinion is wonderful. Having to read all those opinions isn’t. In 2004 there were probably still more people reading blogs than writing them. Not so now, or so it seems.

And:

The great thing about blogs, in my view, is that they share the voice of e-mail. It’s a genuinely new literary form, which, at its best, combines the immediacy of talking with the reflectiveness of writing. But many readers may be reaching the point with blogs and websites that I reached long ago with the Sunday New York Times Magazine–actively hoping there isn’t anything interesting in there because then I’ll have to take the time to read it.

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Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.