Monday, January 3, 2005

The Gonzosphere

This morning Dave wrote,

The professional journalist is totally part of the story he or she is writing. That they believe otherwise is the major bug in their process.

This was also a bug long before blogs came along and began fixing it with a vengeance. The first fixit effort I can remember arrived in what Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and others called The New Journalism. Hunter S. Thompson took this to a personal extreme he called Gonzo Journalism, without which we never would have had Gonzo Marketing, among other things.

Bonus Link: Jay Rosen's Top Ten Ideas of '04: "Content Will be More Important than its Container". My own corollary: Worst metaphor in the history of journalism: that writing is "content". Let's call writing writing. Or "editorial". Or "speech". Or "essay". Or "prose". Or whatever. If it helps, remember this: Content can be regulated as container cargo in the shipping system we call commerce. Meanwhile, Writing is protected as speech by the First Amendment. Yes, I know there are exceptions. But the distinction is real, and important.

(Now back to our irregularly scheduled vacation program, in Las Vegas, where it is, improbably, raining like hell.)

And she's a good writer, too

Eve Maler on her new blog, Pushing String: This may be the world’s first (and last?) XML-and-cross-stitching blog.

She adds,

My current day job is the care and feeding of various identity/web services initiatives on behalf of Sun Microsystems, and I’m involved in the OASIS SAML committee and the Liberty Alliance, among others.

Thanks to Bryan for the pionter.