On Where To Write Well

I have been reading Linda Grant's blog, The Thoughtful Dresser, with great enthusiasm since it was mentioned on Manolo the Shoeblogger's page, and of particular interest was her very brief and certainly incomplete c.v. listed on the site, to wit:

Linda Grant is a novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage in 2006. She writes for the Guardian, Telegraph and Vogue. Her latest novel, The Clothes on Their Backs will be published by Virago in February 2008. For further information see her website at http://lindagrant.co.uk/

It got me thinking about when we would reach a point where a successful blogger could transition easily to print media without being The Blogger of the organization. Right now, I feel like when a blogger snags a job writing for print media, it's a Big Deal, and bloggers are still seen to some extent as wild cowboys and girls of the Internet. It's understandable that this idea would persist - after the Howard Dean rise and fall and the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon and resulting crash landing in the box office, supplemented with hundreds of other examples, there is still no proof that "popular on the Internet" necessarily translates to "popular in real life." Either marketing folks worldwide are not translating between the two circles, or it doesn't work and never will.

I hope that in time, people in marketing and in general will see that the reason you can't narrow down the Internet and pigeonhole its users or content into traditional categories is not that Internet users are strange, alien beings, but that they are everyone, and that has serious implications. Since time immemorial, we've all been marketed to in little bundles...toys for boys, toys for girls, gifts for women who like fashion, gifts for the accepted picture of a feminist, gifts for men always involving tools or sports. I, however, know not one single person who fits only one category or picture, so why these typings persist is beyond me. I can be a feminist (don't get me started on the stereotype of THAT term), love fashion, spike my blood pressure repeatedly with sports, knit, change a tire and most of the fluids on my car, AND hang my own pictures. Obviously, as a woman interested in sports and unafraid of tools, I feel particular hostility towards those marketing powers that be who have decreed both as the exclusive purview of men. I do not want a pink tool set featuring cheap tools that break.

In any case, I hope that marketing folk start seeing the Internet Revolution as it truly is - free expression from every corner of the globe and all walks of life - and adjust accordingly, and also hope that the often snooty print media begin to realize that good writing is good writing, regardless of where it is. I grew up with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, and by the time it made it to my front door, it STILL was awash in typos. It appears to be on an upswing now, but it's still not devoid of issues. I briefly wrote for one of their projects, the Wicked Cool Music site, which showed great potential, had the main page been sustained, and I believe that my writing there was much better, typo-wise, than a large portion of what I've seen published in the T&G's print pages. It's not just me and my ego, either...I feel like the bulk of the things I read online are better written and less typographically problematic than newspapers and sometimes even books and magazines. This does not mean that ALL Internet production is better than print media - I think that's obvious - but the snobbery that seems to abound between bloggers and print media folks seems greatly exaggerated.

I hope that in the nearby future, some editor, maybe late at night after a frenzied day resulting in the rolling of many a head, hops online to read his or her favorite ______________ blog, and suddenly, in a flash of light with the sound of singing angels all around, it comes to them: "These people write just as well as my staff."