Blogging isn't writing

Blogging isn’t writing

It’s a peculiar memory - the photographer of a small town newspaper had some interaction with my father when I was a boy and I met the photographer. Some time later we were driving through a neighborhood and the photographer and some children (presumably his) were playing in the front yard and a ping pong ball bounces out into the street and we drove over it. I remember looking out the back window of the car, seeing the photographer in the street, thinking that we should buy them another ping pong ball.

Telling that story makes it sound like some terrible and repressed childhood memory is about to burst forth. That’s how it would happen in a headshrinker’s office in a movie. But nope. Sometimes a ping pong ball is just a ping pong ball.

I guess that I’m thinking about this because that newspaper isn’t in business anymore and the small town is a bustling suburb. And that’s hardly a story.

What I find interesting is that half the people I’m connected to on LinkedIn began their careers at a newspaper and are now in a tangentially related field - PR, freelancing - because the newspapers are no more. It’s a sad story (not famine in Africa sad, but change is melancholy sad) that’s been told hundreds of times in the last 10 or 15 years. Some journalists are mainly blogging now. That’s not famine in Africa sad either, but . . .

Blogging isn’t writing. It’s not basic essay, a form my high school English teachers would be flabbergasted to learn I’ve come to love. Blogging is faster (500 words is long and there’s serious study going on into how these new forms and methods of communicating are shortening our attention spans - What? Are you still here?), has a lot of hyperlinks (the better to sell you stuff, but also to share readers), numbered lists (FIVE THINGS THAT GET STUCK IN YOUR TEETH AT A LEBANESE RESTAURANT!) which I find gimmicky, but that might just be sour grapes because I’m not very good at it.

It’s not writing that gets you to the core of the human heart the way a novel or a play can (‘By God! To be the King, alive, and fifty, all at the same time!’), and it doesn’t inform and promote ideas and shape thoughts and change minds the way an excellent magazine piece can. (This recent article on economic decline just knocks me out: http://nymag.com/news/features/economic-growth-2013-7/)

I worked at a newspaper for a while and it was the best job I ever went broke doing. Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star and the Kansas City Star for a while and said something like ‘writing for a newspaper is good training as long as you get out of it in time.’ Something like that.

The barriers of entry are low, and there should be access to more good writing to affect the heart and mind.

I’ve been endorsed by some swell folks on LinkedIn for blogging, and I say thank you. I need to pad my resume as much, or a little more, than the next guy, so I don’t intend to give the endorsements back.

But I mean to say that I know that blogging calls for a specific skill set that I don’t really have. I don’t presume to be a good blogger, but I aspire, in my way, to be a great writer.