Daphne Merkin wrote on Jewcy: "Does anyone other than a late-rising member of the chattering classes‚ anyone who is gainfully employed, say, in drilling teeth or writing up legal briefs‚ have the time to read, much less write these things?"
Who has time to read good new books? Nobody has time to read all the good new books, yet I don’t read Daphne Merkin wondering about that. People will read what they believe they will most profit from. Frequently that will mean blogs.
For instance, the most likely place that Daphne Merkin and John Derbyshire are going to be discussed for this dialogue is on a blog. I wonder how quickly Daphne or John will check out a blog once they’ve heard, "I can’t believe what they revealed about you!" Would it take them one second or two seconds to navigate there?
Matt Drudge has affected journalism more than any other person in the past decade and he’s a blogger. I read on Drudge at 11:30 a.m. on election day 2000 that George Bush won in a squeaker. That meant that I knew who would be our next president about six weeks before those who solely got their news from mainstream sources.
To put things in perspective for Ms. Merkin, I suspect I get more readers in a day (about 10,000) to my blogs than have ever read her novel ‘Enchantment.’
The solitary art of blogging is not inherently different from the solitary art of writing for publication in newspapers and magazines. There are plenty of essays I’ve written for websites that I have worked on for years.
Not all blogging is tossed off and not all writing for publication in The New York Times is considered. And not all writing that is tossed off is bad and not all writing that is considered is good. Spontaneous prose sometimes sparkles and studied prose sometimes drags (a la ‘Enchantment’). What primarily matters about a piece of writing is not who publishes it but whether the work has merit. Daphne’s writing on blogs, for instance, lacks merit even though it is published by the frequently provocative Jewcy.com.
