September 29, 2005
BLOGGED OUT: It's hard to make fun of bloggers when they're so quick to make fun of themselves. Ana Marie Cox, who edits the political gossip Web site Wonkette, got quite a few laughs by disparaging her chosen profession at a Wednesday morning panel discussion on blogging sponsored by Condé Nast (parent of WWD) and Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. "Blogging is ridiculously easy to do," Cox told an audience of media big shots, including Norman Pearlstine, Nora Ephron and Hendrik Hertzberg. "My cat could do it. Most of all human endeavor - call it 99 percent - is crap. That also applies to blogs. Most of them [seem to be] written by cats, or about cats, or about knitting or militias." Cox also said the stereotype of bloggers spending all day in their pajamas was "mostly true, unfortunately."
After bloggers themselves, the next most popular target was The New York Times. Insisting that Web users demand a high degree of accuracy from news sites, Weblogs Inc. founder Jason McCabe Calcanis said, "The second you make a mistake, it's boom, boom, boom, boom, 'You idiot.' It's brutal. The writers at The New York Times wouldn't be able to handle it."
Calcanis also derided the paper's new premium content service, Times Select, suggesting it would only drive more traffic, and advertising, to free opinion sites. "Please put more things behind the firewall," he urged. "Really, keep doing it."
Cox agreed. "There's such a cottage industry of critiquing Times columnists, you don't actually have to read them anymore. There's IdisagreewithMaureenDowd.com. That's a real Web site."
- Jeff Bercovici