On Blogging

Andrew Sullivan has a fantastic article at The Atlantic about blogging. I'm pretty lousy in terms of cultivating dcat, and my Foreign Policy Association blogs (on South Africa and Africa) are unorthodox -- I distill news stories and provide longer commentary. I'm sure my editors hate me because I do not play all of the games geared toward drawing eyes -- short, frequent posts, with multiple links to other bloggers, assiduous attention to the quid pro quo of blogging, and the like.

One of the things I like about Sullivan is his unabashed defense of a genre that still can garner eyerolling. Some time ago I received business cards from the Foreign Policy Association that simply give my title as "blogger," and it seemed a little silly to me, almost embarrassing. Since I have written a number of analytical pieces for them, I prefer the term "writer" or something along those lines. And yet this medium, however imperfectly I do it (as you well know), largely reflects the prevailing direction of media today and in the future. Sullivan's article provides a pretty good articulation of what blogging means and why it can matter, albeit mostly from the vantage point of the high-end professionals like himself.