Thursday, April 14, 2005

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Bravo to the public relations staff

The hardworking PR team here at danieldrezner.com has had a good week:

1) Last Friday, Slate's Jack Shafer managed to compliment me while simultaneously comparing me and other bloggers to low-wage Chinese labor:

When it comes to opinion pieces, bloggers have an edge over the pros. I'm not saying that bloggers are necessarily better writers than full-time members of the commentariat, but Daily Kos, Joshua Marshall, Daniel Drezner, Daily Howler, Volokh Conspiracy, Brad DeLong, et al., produce more immediate and succinct copy than their mainstream colleagues. To stretch a manufacturing analogy, unsalaried bloggers represent low-cost Chinese laborers, professional journalists the well-paid-with-benefits American workers. Given the right tools and infrastructure, low-cost Chinese labor can produce work that is every bit the equal of the high-price kind. What the Web has done is remove the barriers to entry from opinion journalism, much to the benefit of readers. If told that I had to forgo the editorial and op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times or lose my blog bookmarks, I'd say hands off my browser!

2) Today I discovered that the John Bolton post got mentioned on the "Inside The Blogs" feature at CNN's Inside Politics with Judy Woodruff -- click here to see the video, and here to read the transcript (in which they misspell my last name).

I'm grateful to CNN's "blog correspondents" Jacki Schechner and Cal Chamberlain [Now there's somehing to go on the old resume!--ed.] Seeing the clip, my one thought is that there has got to be a better way for CNN to show the blogs than just jamming a camera at the computer screen.

3) Finally, the Village Voice's education supplement discusses blogs and academia, or, as they put it, "Blogodemia." In her brief guide to scholar bloggers, Geeta Dayal says about yours truly:

Politics blogosphere-wise, he's one of the heaviest hitters.

She also has nice things to say about my colleague at the U of C, physicist Sean Carroll and his blog Preposterous Universe.

Dayal's main story about how the blogosphere is invading academia is worth checking out as well. This sounds awfully familiar:

[Larry] Lessig found that blogging opened up his sphere of interaction considerably. "I've published a bunch of articles in law reviews, and I think I've gotten maybe a total of 10 letters about them in the history of my career as an academic," he says. "I publish stuff on the blog, I get literally hundreds of e-mails about things all the time."

Being compared to cheap labor, getting my name misspelled at cnn.com, and a citation in the Village Voice -- yes, it's been a banner week for the PR staff!!

posted by Dan on 04.14.05 at 11:48 PM




Comments:

>> read the transcript (in which they misspell my last name).

posted by: Jim Holmes on 04.14.05 at 11:48 PM [permalink]



The first post lost a bit of what I entered... Should have read:

"read the transcript (in which they misspell my last name). "

Good thing they've got fact-checkers and editors, unlike pajama-clad bloggers!

posted by: Jim Holmes on 04.14.05 at 11:48 PM [permalink]



I disagree with this comparison:

To stretch a manufacturing analogy, unsalaried bloggers represent low-cost Chinese laborers, professional journalists the well-paid-with-benefits American workers.

Some of the bloggers he cites as examples - Brad DeLong, Mr. Drezner, Josh Marshall, the Volokhs - experts in their respective fields, who can craft a product within their specialty far superior those done by the generalists in the mainstream media.

A better comparison would be between a person crafting a dining table in their spare time with buying something from IKEA. The IKEA table will be of decent quality for a decent price. The individually produced works will have much greater variation - a skilled artisan will create a far superior product. Some hobbyists might produce something inferior, but take great joy in it; others will labor to produce something exquisite.

What the web does for opinion journalism is open the market to hobbyists and artisans alike. IKEA will still be the biggest seller with the broadest appeal (occasionally commissioning something they like from the artisans and hobbyists, if they're smart), but the artisans and hobbyists can now fill niches previously left empty.

Pareto efficient all around.

posted by: Independent George on 04.14.05 at 11:48 PM [permalink]



Independent George: The individually produced works will have much greater variation

Yep, it's the Long Tail at work again.

posted by: fling93 on 04.14.05 at 11:48 PM [permalink]






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