User Submitted Blog Post: The Mainstream Digs In

It took a while for the mainstream media to embrace blogging because so much of what it promised ran counter to what journalists are trained to do. Publish immediately? Well, that's heresy: Pieces need to run by editors and go through some sort of fact-checking process. Say whatever's on your mind? Hogwash: A real journalist, even one who works in the first person, deals in considered contemplation of ideas. Outbound links? Isn't the idea to keep people on your site, where your advertisers are?

All of those worries have died off in recent years. That's partly because media outlets are in a panic in the face of declining revenue, and they'll try anything that will prompt a return to the 20-percent profit margins they used to enjoy. (A ridiculous hope, but that's another post for another day.) But it also comes thanks to the realization that blogging is simply a publishing tool, not a lifestyle, and even if it's coming a few years late, it's nice to see the New Yorker and Harper's launch book blogs, as they both recently have.

The New Yorker blog, Book Bench, is a quick-hit site of updates and links; it does a nice job of finding small bloggable ideas to tinker with (like pondering the history of cricket-themed novels), and doesn't make too much of them. More intimidating, but in many ways much more engaging, is Sentences, a blog on the Harper's Web site written solely (thus far) by critic Wyatt Mason. Where the Book Bench, like many litblogs, digs down a few feet into a particular subject, Mason drills deep. For the past week he's been ruminating very thoughtfully on a recent discussion between New Yorker critic James Wood and novelist Jonathan Franzen, discussing the role of American novel, more specifically the purposefully challenging novel that also finds a mainstream audience.

Media outlets from the New York Times on down haven't been slow to get online---as early as 1995, when I was an intern at Mother Jones magazine's Web site, we were aware that everybody knew the Web was an important place to be. But the media have been slow in changing its attitude toward publishing; for years the thinking has been that if a piece wasn't vetted and run through multiple layers of readers, it didn't deserve to exist. That's still a hard mode of thinking for me to get past. But there are clearly ways to make the most serious and considered outlets operate at blog speed (if not Twitter speed); the fact that two eminent literary outlets have put the effort into making it work is heartening, both for readers and for the future of the business.