Andrew Sullivan, a print journalist who has had an online presence since 2000, has penned a great article about blogging in this month's The Atlantic:
A blog bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its
anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically
able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course.
The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of
authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other
nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and
the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation,
rather than a production.
Given that I have been blogging for the same amount of time and that I, too, am a print journalist, I particularly identified with this paragraph:
From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple
experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers
was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation
of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the
alternative meant. I’d edited a weekly print magazine, The New Republic,
for five years, and written countless columns and essays for a variety
of traditional outlets. And in all this, I’d often chafed, as most
writers do, at the endless delays, revisions, office politics,
editorial fights, and last-minute cuts for space that dead-tree
publishing entails. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in
the early days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a
narcotic.
