KS: [Blogging] allows more for what the New Yorker calls the “reasonably intelligent person” to write about what they’re reasonably interested in, and I think that’s definitely the legacy of new journalism. Blogging seems to preference extreme niching — like, I read a blog that’s specifically about the design of movie posters — and extreme generalism; someone like Jason Kottke, who is just a person with a huge brain. The blog is a reflection of the highways and byways of that brain.

When you look at new journalists like Susan Orlean, I think you see someone who is essentially a generalist who may get pigeonholed a little bit because she writes for New Yorker magazine, but you essentially see someone who is interested in a lot of different things and her books and her body of work are a reflection of where that curiosity has taken her. I would love to see Susan Orlean blog.

PM: Do you see many of the new journalists writing on their own blogs or on the Web as children of the “gonzo” or “new journalists” of the 1960s and 70s? Did their tearing down the boundaries allow more freedom today in the online medium?

KS: I think much of what we see in what is called “we” media is a legacy of new journalism. It’s a legacy of the need not to have professional credentials and academic training and 20 years of blood spilled on a newspaper beat in order to have the right to write in Vanity Fair or something like that. It’s sort of experience on the fly.

Do I think that bloggers are the logical next heirs to Joan Didion and Gay Talese? Not exactly. But I think the idea of doing something crazy, or doing something interesting simply because it’s worth writing about later — [that idea] that Hunter Thompson gave us, or to a more civilized extent, John McPhee and people like that — I think that’s definitely the legacy of blogging. I think that definitely led to what we call blogging and citizen journalism now.

Kevin Smokler will be appearing at Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn on June 7, 2005.

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