I spent the day yesterday at a conference about blogging at Yale Law School. Very interesting panels, two very entertaining and thoughtful talks by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles. I made some meandering comments about what it’s like to write a blog and work as a professional journalist at the same time. And one of the folks involved in putting the thing together did a sort of loose transcription of what I said.
(That’s me in the foreground and Mickey Kaus in the background in that picture.)
Loved the conference, but one of the issues that came up at the post-conference dinner last night is one I’ve really wanted to write about for some time: blog triumphalism. What do I mean by that? I guess I mean the many folks who write blogs and live in a world in which there is a place called The New York Times populated by several dozen basically feckless and cocooned reporters, constantly outdone and corrected and outwitted and generally ground into the dirt by a few bloggers up at odd hours jabbing away at a laptop keyboard. As Mickey Kaus said at dinner last night, it’s easy when you’re writing one of these things to start thinking that you rule the world.