WTF: NYRB takes a literary look at blogs
The NY Review of Books ran a piece by Sarah Boxer about blogs. It’s a decent survey of the numbers and trends around blogs, and hits all the highlights (Washintonienne, etc.). There’s some entertainment value, such as the anthropological, 101 way Boxer explains blogs to effete, well-read, liberal subscribers to NYRB (the bracketed explanations of 
, WTF, and BTW add little smiles to the stream of words coming into the brain). But, what I love about it is that it looks at the style of blogs.
Writing like this might seem easy, but just try it. Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford who writes for newspapers and radio and sometimes contributes to the blog Language Log, admitted on NPR back in 2004, “I don’t quite have the hang of the form.” And, he added, many journalists who get called upon by their editors to keep blogs are similarly stumped: “They fashion engaging ledes, they develop their arguments methodically, they give context and background, and tack helpful IDs onto the names they introduce.” Guess what? They read like journalists, not bloggers.
Bloggers are golden when they’re at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn’t the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that’s no way to blog.
Blogging at its freest is like going to a masked ball. …
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that.