April 29th, 2008
The Jeffrey Goldberg has been thrust into the role of blogger. This strikes me as a not very good idea, since blogging has a habit of occasionally ruining fine journalists. (Don’t make me name names. You already know.) But the idea of Goldberg blogging reminds me of an old George Will joke about the addition of a wild card to the baseball playoffs: On the one hand, all change is bad. On the other hand, more baseball is always good.
Ultimately, I think the wild card has worked out pretty well. So while blogging is bad, more Goldberg is good and I’m open to the idea that this could work out okay. Certainly his first post is encouraging:
Friends tell me that I will take naturally to blogging because I am in possession of many poorly considered opinions about issues I understand only marginally. I am dubious, however. My day job is to produce overlong narrative stories for the magazine that sponsors and funds his website. These stories are meant to be exhaustively researched, carefully constructed and closely edited. Whether they justify the effort is for the reader to decide. In my opinion, they occasionally do, but I don’t like most writing, including my own. For what it’s worth, I’ve been writing now for about twenty years. I joined the Atlantic last year, from the New Yorker. Before writing for the New Yorker, I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, and before that, for New York Magazine. I have nearly run out of magazines. I will undoubtedly be ending my career at Cat Fancy.
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