After finishing the article by Lissa Warren in the Huffington Post, which practically recited verbatim the canard about the problems of the shrinking newspaper coverage of books and the failure of blogs to pick up the slack, I read Edward Champion’s and Michael Orthofer’s replies. Their replies, in short, demolish her argument. Demolish: a thorough, rhetorical leveling, on par with Dresden.
Champion argues very cogently that newspaper coverage and blog coverage do not offer a neat one-to-one correlation; in other words, while blogs provide wonderful material, it is slightly incommensurable with newspapers. Orthofer argues that when categories are taken into account (such as translated fiction), The Complete Review, aptly named, easily trumps most mainstream book reviewing publications. Also, he combats the assertion that blogs aren’t reviewing books, noting all the sister companions of blogs (The Quarterly Conversation, OLM), as well as blogs that do review on their site.
This Blogs-Are-Not-Book-Reviews argument is getting very, very tiring. For a little over a year there’s been a rash of these anti-blog articles, and most of them are journalistically incompetent when it comes to evaluating the blogosphere. I understand deadlines, but too many journalists are not meeting the minimum threshold of investigation and research — not bothering to check easily verifiable facts, and not willing to upend narrow-minded and parochial views about what constitutes book coverage.
So, in light of this continuing intellectual intransigence, I’m calling for a moratorium on these types of articles complaining about literary blogs. Full-stop, any and all publications, internationally. Also, I’m leveling a moratorium on under-informed comments in interviews by well known authors. (Richard Ford, I’m thinking of you).
If, at some presently unidentifiable point in the future, this ban needs to be lifted, the Rule of Ten will be instituted. The Rule of Ten covers a few basic principles that should be obvious to any trained journalist but which seems to have escaped the purview of quite a few. In order to write any article about blogs, you must:
- Read 10 of the best blogs for 10 days straight. And by read, I don’t only mean check into their daily posts, but investigate their backlog. Interviews, Reviews on Companion sites, all corollary materials accompanying that particular person and site. Also, avoid the logical Fallacy of Accident (or of Exception): using the worst examples of blogs to prove a point. Also, avoid the Fallacy of Sloppy Journalism: naming as few sites as you can get away with.
- Read 10 articles from mainstream publications that complain about blogs. See if your problems with the literary blogosphere are exactly the same as the inane complaints leveled many, many times before.
- Read 10 of the blog posts (there are many, by now) rebutting the mainstream news articles commenting on the blogosphere. It seems mainstream articles exist in a hermetically sealed room in which the same arguments are repeated ad infinitum without any intrusion by the rhetorically superior positions of the blogs themselves. So break the seal. Interact with conflicting ideas.
If, after following the three steps of the Rule of Ten, you still believe that there is a legitimate point to be made, please, by all means, write an article. We would welcome any (original, thought-provoking, researched, intelligent) discussion.
