Carpetbagging with Carr: Blogospheric!
It's tough to complain about The Carpetbagger, the Times's just-launched Oscar-season blog by David Carr, mostly because it's a pleasure to read David Carr on just about anything, especially when he's given some extra leash to be un-Timesianly light and clever. But we wouldn't feel like ourselves if we didn't at least try to complain, and so we've come up with this:
How in God's name does the man write so fucking quickly? We've got two of us here, and we both pull ourselves out of bed around 7:30 in the morning, and, still, we struggle to have a combined six or eight items posted by 10ish. But check the timestamps on Carr's six posts this morning: "Bo Knows Bupkis," 9:32 a.m.; "National Divide," 9:42 a.m.; "Shacking Up," 9:43 a.m.; "Kong Gets an A in Conduct," 9:47 a.m.; "The Bo Mo' for the Big Monkey?" 9:48 a.m.; "Tangled Tinsel," 9:51 a.m. To turn out that much copy, that quickly, we feared there was only one answer: Welcome to the Coke side of life.
But wait! There's another, less-addled, explanation. Times poobah Jon Landman sent a staff memo yesterday introducing the paper's news blogging projects — The Carpetbagger is merely a first strike — and explaining how they'd work:
We'll use the technology our way. Our bloggers will have editors. They will observe our normal standards of fairness and care. They won't float rumors or take journalistic shortcuts. Critics and opinion columnists can have opinion blogs; reporters can't.... We'll encourage readers to post their thoughts, but we'll screen them first to make sure the conversation is civil. Some bloggers will accuse us of violating blogospheric standards of openness and spontaneity. That's life in the big city.
So this being an edited blog (and, by the way: j'accuse!), we'd imagine Carr took a bit more than 19 minutes to write the six posts — which subsequently, we suspect, hit an editing bottleneck. From which they suddenly, near-contemporaneously emerged.
Which means it must be his copy editor who's on the Coke side of life.
Landman's full memo — with his further feelings on blogs and bloggers, plus news of a real-estate blog TK soon — awaits after the jump.
To: The Staff
From: Jon Landman
December 7, 2005
We're blogospheric.
Yesterday we launched a genuine, authentic, by-the-book New York Times blog. It's Carpetbagger, by David Carr. It's part of a new movie-awards-season web site called Red Carpet, which includes a bunch of things you won't see in the newspaper, like weekly columns by Joyce Wadler and Caryn James. You'll see a refer on today's front page, which I boldly, if ignorantly, declare to be our first-ever page-1 refer to a web-only feature. At the very least, it's our first-ever page 1 refer to a blog.
Within a few days, we'll put up a real estate blog by Damon Darlin and others. More blogs are in the works. Even more are at the idea stage. We've come late to blogging, obviously, though we've put toes in the water on a number of occasions, as when our movie critics sent running commentary from last year's Cannes film festival.
But our new blogs are more than running commentary. Look at Carr's. It's full of links to film publications and blogs and web sites. It encourages responses from readers and hopes to start a lively conversation. Nothing is more important to the future of our web ambitions than to engage our sophisticated readers. Blogs are one way to do it.
It's worth spending a little time thinking about blogs, and about ourselves. Blogs make some newspaper people nuts; they're partisan, the thinking goes, and unfair and mean-spirited and sloppy about facts. Newspapers make some bloggers nuts; they think we're dull and slow and pompous and jealous guardians of unearned "authority."
It's a pretty dopey argument. Indeed, some blogs are lousy. So are some newspapers. Some blogs reject journalism. Some practice it.
The point is, a blog is nothing more than a piece of technology. It allows people to compile thoughts, connect with others and interact quickly with readers. People can use it any way they want to. It has no inherent ethical or moral quality, though it does have its own special power.
We'll use the technology our way. Our bloggers will have editors. They will observe our normal standards of fairness and care. They won't float rumors or take journalistic shortcuts. Critics and opinion columnists can have opinion blogs; reporters can't. (To quote Carr: "If the Carpetbagger delved into plot or relative quality — they didn't turn me loose for my refined cinematic taste — flying monkeys would come out of the ceiling here at headquarters and behead him.") We'll encourage readers to post their thoughts, but we'll screen them first to make sure the conversation is civil. Some bloggers will accuse us of violating blogospheric standards of openness and spontaneity. That's life in the big city.
We will use blogs to convey information, sometimes in conventional ways, sometimes not-so. Our notions of journalistic responsibility are perfectly compatible with spirited fun. Do we put David Carr online to be witless? Um, no. Actually, we think he's pretty witty in the newspaper.
Blogging does impose obligations. Blogs have to be updated frequently. They have to be carefully tended. There are costs; David Carr and Damon Darlin will be spending time they could be using to write newspaper articles. Their bosses have decided that's an advantageous tradeoff. I agree.
Thoughts? Bring 'em on.
