Columns and Weblogs
How much are weblogs like newspaper columns? There's plenty of variety in each -- which in itself can be a theme for a column -- or weblog. A lot of blogs look like a
"News Briefs" or "People in the News" collection of bits and pieces, with the addition of linking each item to something elsewhere on the Web that inspired the entry. I guess the reason I don't use this weblog regularly is that my "mental model" is one a longer newspaper column, something that may have digressions, but wraps them up at the end. That kind of writing takes me too long -- or maybe I just need more practice to get back that "daily deadlines" speed.
Here's an example, digressing into thoughts about newspapers and columnists and the phrase "self-deprecating sense of humor" that someone slipped into my letter of recommendation...
Sydney Omarr, the syndicated astrology columnist, slipped in one last "If today is your birthday..." horoscope for me a few weeks before he died: "You are a natural reporter and have skill as writer," he said, along with something about sex appeal and being "off to a fast start in January... Most memorable month will be April."
I'm more interested in irony and coincidences than astrology. I stumbled on that annual birthday column off and on over the years and was amused by how regularly the themes of writing, editing, reporting and teaching showed up -- all the things I've done for a living. (He never mentioned the banjo playing, but I shouldn't either. It made me tens of dollars.)
When I was a kid my mother regularly checked Mr. Omarr's column on my birthday, and probably read it to me. Was he already linking that date in December to the world of words? Could that have planted some subconscious impulse toward journalism? Mom read those horoscopes in the old Boston Record American or the Daily Hampshire Gazette, which I delivered back then -- my first "newspaper job." We also got the Herald Traveler on the weekends, and sometimes the Boston Globe. Newspapers were as big a part of our lives then as the Web is now.
The first bylined columnist I remember reading regularly was Arthur Hoppe in the Gazette. I wonder if Mr. Omarr saw journalism in Mr. Hoppe's future, or his own -- they both stuck with it for a half century. I think about newspaper columnists like them whenever I dust off this weblog. How do the real pros like Jimmy Breslin, Art Buchwald and Mike Royko find so much to say, so often and so well?
If I made it a point to "blog" regularly, could I develop that kind of "regular column" discipline? Even if I had enough to say, Dr. Johnson's words float before my eyes: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
Still, the optimist in me can't help seeing the "weblog" idea as a way to get people back in the habit of reading and writing -- maybe for love, but maybe as a new way to report the news to each other. Maybe reading the work of enough amateurs will inspire readers to search out the work of solid professionals with fact-checkers and editors (not that there aren't professional blockheads too).
Whether journalism students will find careers in the weblog world or not, I like to think that a few journalism courses would do webloggers some good: Help them separate fact from opinion, teach them about libel law, shake the excess adverbs out of their vocabulary, maybe make them less verbose than I am...
Those vague hopes are why I'm trying to keep up with software that makes weblogs easy to do. This week I'm off to Harvard to find out about online publishing engines called "Open Source Content Management Systems." I've already installed a couple with the unlikely names of Zope and Plone.
As for Sydney Omarr's other predictions for me, most are about as accurate as "...exude vibrations of personality, sex appeal." My "fast start" January found me four weeks behind before the month was half over; April was memorable only for getting my taxes filed on time. (I have long considered April 15 to be the main religious holiday of the devout procrastinator...)
June looks like a better candidate for "most memorable": On the 11th I'm finally scheduled to "defend" my doctoral dissertation. A couple of weeks later I'm scheduled to have a wisdom tooth pulled. Sydney Omarr should have said something about my inclinations toward coincidence and irony.
8:54:51 PM 
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