I was on a panel Tuesday discussing “The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging” Tuesday at the Magazine Publishers of America’s annual digital conference. Because I am the Blogspert.
Actually, no. It was because Lev Grossman was sick and I was his last-minute replacement. Business Week‘s Heather Green, who co-authors a blog about blogging (!), was the moderator. She had asked the readers of her blog for questions for the panel; my favorite was:
Just what do any of the folks taking part in this panel (or in the audience, for that matter) expect to learn or impart that hasn’t already been beaten, stuffed and relegated to the attic?
Well, I don’t think I imparted much. But here’s what I learned:
1) TVGuide.com has gone totally blogwild, with 16 blogs by its editors and veritable oodles of reader-created blogs, the best of which are featured on its home page.
2) Wendy Perrin, the consumer news editor of Conde Nast Traveler and author of the blog The Perrin Post, works harder than I do. Yes, this work takes place aboard cruise ships and such. But I’m afraid of cruise ships.
3) When it comes to blogging, we magazine people feel like poor little upstart outsiders. Heather asked why no magazine blogs had cracked are in the Technorati Top 100 of the most linked-to blogs (actually, National Review Online’s The Corner is No. 65, and I’d like to think our own Swampland will make it at some point). NYMag.com editorial director Ben Williams said it was because our blogs haven’t been around nearly as the long as the “established blogs.” The blogosphere arose in part as a rebellion against the establishment Mainstream Media. Now it is its own establishment. So we’re the scrappy little guys (in our midtown Manhattan skyscrapers) taking on the Mainstream Blogosphere. Yeah, that’s it! &$#@ the MSB!
Update: Here’s another post on the subject. And yet another.
Update 2: The estimable Wendy Perrin weighs in (with thrilling photos!) here.
Update 3: A reader who loves Radar says in the comments that RadarOnline.com cracked the Technorati Top 100 not long ago, although it has since fallen back out. At the time, Radar did not exist as a paper magazine, so I’m not sure its blog would have rightly been counted as a magazine blog. That said, my wording above was unnecessarily sweeping (and, I think, misrepresented what Heather actually said), so I have changed it.