Click here for CNN Entertainment while the link lasts. Not sure how long the story will be linked. I noticed the link Friday around 3 or 4 pm. I'm guessing it may last through the weekend.
Going from a local blogger duking it out in the online scene, to having a direct connection to CNN in the past month, has been part of an exciting journey into the media world. It's sort of a weird rags to riches story for any blogger to go through.
I'll be curious to see how much traffic will come to ABC23 through CNN. I'm guessing somewhere between 25,000-50,000 visits, but really can only guess. Could be double that.
Getting such links isn't just good for me as a blogger. Really, it's good for Bakersfield, the Bakersfield music scene, Korn and Brian "Head" Welch.
Yes, I started working for ABC 23 as Managing Editor - By N.L. Belardes
Might as well tell you now as I'm going to start appearing on the news cast. So pay attention to the ABC 23 MySpace (www.myspace.com/kerotv23). Your comments might get on the air... I'll also be blogging from the news room. So stay tuned for that.
I'm writing and posting content to www.turnto23.com. There, Jason Sperber, are you happy now? hahaha...
In related news...
Gotta love shuttle landings. Check out the video. Big thanks to Erin for teaching me how to compress and post the file. It was a fun story to write.
Short and sweet and one more shuttle landing in Kern's rich aviation history.
Here's a funny video ABC 23 is making just for the Web called a Daily Dose of Bull...
N. Frank Daniels joins Noveltown, and in good fashion, begins by bashing N+1's elitism toward the literary scene - N.L. Belardes and N. Frank Daniels
What's this? A literary journal just waiting to get bitch-slapped? Image taken at Russo's by N.L. Belardes Go to www.russosbooks.com
First off I want to welcome N. Frank Daniels, author of Futureproof, to the Noveltown team. He'll be posting here often. In fact, you can expect him to be carrying the Noveltown standard into literary battles and peacekeeping missions; you know, cleaning up the messes of literary disasters like one you're about to read.
And don't forget to ask yourself if Noveltown is guilty of the very arguments Frank illuminates... - n.l.
The Infotainment Revolution Vs. n+1 & the Literary Elite: Collision Course In A Handbasket Bound For Hell - By N. Frank Daniels
n+1 is inside...tread carefully
"At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past." ~M. Maeterlinck
"You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art." ~Benjamin Disraeli
"The covers of this book are too far apart." ~Ambrose Bierce
Recently the “upstart” “literary” review n+1 published an editorial arguing that the litblog culture has dumbed-down the entirety of the litworld; that instead of good, intellectual criticism, blogs are more ass-kissing fandom than real exposition or serious enquiry and therefore abandon true literary debate and critical thinking.
From n+1’s “The Blog Reflex”
In addition to free advance copies, the blogger gets some recognition: from the big houses, and from fellow bloggers. Recognition is also measured in the number of hits -- by their clicks you shall know them -- and by the people who bother to respond to your posts with subposts of their own. The lit-bloggers become a self-sustaining community, minutemen ready to rise up in defense of their niches. So it is when people have only their precarious self-respect. But responses -- fillips of contempt, wet kisses -- aren't criticism.
Intelligence seeps from its very cover
As has been asserted in other blogs of note, the n+1 article attacks a cadre of straw men and generally bunches every litblog into one, disregarding the multitudinous blogs whose entire existence is focused on exactly the thing n+1 pats itself on the back for being: the keepers of the flame, the last regiment protecting the old guard. But as can be seen in the first-ever editorial posted in the first-ever issue of the Paris Review in 1953, the flame n+1 purports itself to courageously and valiantly guard is much older than they’d probably like to admit. Even in 1953 (and about 200 years earlier than that as we’ll see later), William Styron was taking the old guard to task. I’ll let Styron speak for himself. Remember, this piece was written 54 years ago:
Literally speaking, we live in what has been described as The Age of Criticism. Full of articles on Kafka and James, on Melville, or whatever writer is in momentary ascendancy; laden with terms like architectonic, Zeitgeist, and dichotomous, the literary magazines seem today on the verge of doing away with literature, not with any philistine bludgeon but by smothering it under the weight of learned chatter.
One of you has written that it is not always editorial policy that brings such a disproportion of critical manuscripts across the editors’ desks, pointing out that ‘in our schools and colleges all the emphasis is on analysis and organization of ideas, not creation.’ The result is that we have critics, not creators.
Let’s by all means leave out the lordly tone and merely say: dear reader, THE PARIS REVIEW hopes to emphasize creative work not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book.
A critic nowadays will set up straw-men, saying that Mailer had Ahab in mind when he created Sergeant Croft, that Jim Jones thought of Hamlet when he came up with his bedeviled Private Prewitt, stating further, however, that neither of these young men have created figures worthy of Melville or Shakespeare; they do this, or they leap to the opposite pole and cry out that no one writing today even tries to create figures of the tragic stature of Lear. I still maintain that the times get precisely the literature they deserve, and that if the writing of this period is gloomy the gloom is not so much inherent in the literature as in the times. The writer’s duty is to keep on writing, creating memorable Pvt. Prewitts and Sgt. Crofts; to hell with Ahab. If he does not think one way or another that he can create literature worthy of himself and his place, at this particular moment in history, in his society, then he’d better pawn his Underwood, or become a critic.
A contrast is 'good'/'crappy'
Keith Gessen, editor of n+1 gleefully points out the distinction between his journal and others like the Paris Review (which he disparagingly refers to as “throwing creative writing contests”), saying of his n+1, “It’s just a different model of magazine. Eliot’s Criterion, where he published The Waste Land, or something like Partisan Review (those guys published their own poetry!), are places where the editors had things they wanted to say that they believed no one else was saying. Irving Howe’s Dissent. Herzen’s Bell. Dwight Macdonald’s Politics. Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes. The other model is curatorial: you’re throwing a creative writing contest and whoever wins the contest gets published. That’s the New American Review or the Paris Review—or the thousand magazines associated with MFA programs. They’re both valid models, but obviously we’re working in the first one.” So the gist of Gessen’s argument is that this “different model of magazine” belongs on the wall with the other elitist publications that are blazing a new trail and therefore must publish their own work to set an example for all of their lesser counterparts. That’s so…self-righteously cute.
Just for the record, the Paris Review, which n+1 apparently looks down it’s snooty and bespectacled nose at, has published some of the earliest known poetry and prose of the following writers (among many others):
Raymond Carver Bobbie Ann Mason Robert Stone John Updike William T. Vollmann Vladamir Nabokov Rick Moody Toni Morrison Margaret Atwood David Foster Wallace Ted Hughes Jonathan Franzen Truman Capote Jorge Louis Borges Alice Munro Jay McInerney William Faulkner John Irving Hunter S. Thompson William Burroughs Jim Carroll Denis Johnson Jack Kerouac Primo Levi Kurt Vonnegut W.S. Merwin John Le Carre Susan Sontag Umberto Eco Galway Kinnell Ian McEwan Joyce Carol Oates Philip Roth Robert Bly Gabriel Garcia Marquez Allen Ginsberg Billy Collins Seamus Heaney Norman Mailer Gary Snyder Anthony Burgess T.C. Boyle James Baldwin Philip Larkin V.S. Naipaul Tennessee Williams E.L. Doctorow Joseph Heller Don DeLillo
That’s one hell of a creative writing contest. It reads like the Harlem Globetrotters of both popular and critically acclaimed literature of the last century. But we’ll give n+1 the benefit of the doubt here and let them dig their own hole. They say that they are following “the first model.” Fair enough. But wait. n+1 doesn’t just leave it at that. This hubris extends even further, as demonstrated in an interview Gessen granted to The New York Enquirer (Philadelphia’s bastard sister paper?). In the interview, Gessen carefully lays out a position that directly confronts what most lit “types” consider sacred, and then proceeds to smashing their heads on n+1’s (they wish) punk rock. Gessen has now officially thrown down the gauntlet in the initiation of what is ultimately some kind of misguided and ridiculous offensive aimed not only at “Type two” lit journals, but also at every litblog on the web:
This is where McSweeney's and the Believer come in. When we launched, it seemed like they were the ideal representatives of a certain kind of literary position, which states that 1) reading, in any form, is good, that writing is good, that literature is good; 2) all these things are imperiled, and therefore 3) that anything done in the service of these things is good. We disagree with all three parts of that, even #2. And we've said so a number of times.
Uh-oh. Methinks I hear the first hint of asshole coming out of the uber-elite litworld critics, valiantly headed up by one Keith Gessen and his brainchild. n+1: the savior of all the downtrodden critics and bearers of the flame of true literary appreciation.
Only 2 copies left...but nobody's buyin'...literati have turned in for the night
“I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, ‘I wanna grow up and be a critic.’” ~Richard Pryor
Gessen continues his lament for the loss of the olden ways as follows:
When we got out of college, in the late 90s, there were a number of really good highbrow magazines for us to try to write for. Most of those magazines are now gone. So as of three years ago, basically, the only thing you could aspire to as a young writer was to write for the New Yorker, which isn't a bad aspiration in itself, but it strikes me as the wrong aspiration for a young person to have. The New Yorker wasn't meant to serve that function—a highbrow function—and really I don't think it ever was asked to before just a few years ago.
This is one of the most depressing and pathetic things I have ever read: a man pronouncing the death knell of smart-people literature and the loss of avenue for which his great kind can publish and be appreciated.
So with respect to creating a place that is unapologetically highbrow that—if you were me eight years ago—you'd want to write for, I think we've partly done that. Unfortunately, we've failed to create an infrastructure to help us work with people who come to us and want to write. We’re working on that.
Again, Gessen here sounds like a whiny bitch but at least he’s trying to create his writer’s utopia instead of just bitching about the state of things. It is to me, though, a laughable scenario, like a bunch of nerds complaining about the lack of good calculators in an AP Physics class, but at least he’s not attacking the other 99% of the lit world’s readers and writers. Oh yeah, we nearly forgot. He is.
The standard model for a literary magazine these days is not the New Criterion but something more like Ploughshares or McSweeney's—basically, a kind of short-story contest curated by one editor or a rotating series of editors. You might have a mix of stories and essays, but they will be chosen because they met certain standards of being a "good story." And obviously those standards are very different from one magazine to the next. I really don't think there's a tyranny of the workshop creating a particular kind of story. Even [the] Iowa [Writers’ Workshop] creates different kind of stories. But the point for us is we're much more focused on the idea of a story’s or essay's necessity—is it necessary, does it explain our situation, some part of our situation? If so, then we'll edit it until it's good. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how good it is.
I’m not sure from where Gessen hails but in my neck of the woods them’s fightin’ words. Though I have to admit that we here at Noveltown were hesitant to even address this issue because it is somewhat akin to the media hoopla that erupts every time Ann Coulter opens her mouth in yet another idiotic plea for attention. This whole debacle is nothing if not n+1’s attempt at garnering a fleeting bit of recognition. For the entirety of the time that we’ve been blogging on lit topics, we've railed against this kind of ivory tower posturing and snide holier-than-thou assholishness. As Tristan Tzara once said, “The rest, called ‘literature,’ is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.” I take this to mean that ivory tower posturing such as expressed by the likes of n+1 is done with a certain “I'm more educated and refined than you are, so drop dead, you have nothing of worth to contribute.” Gessen and n+1 miss the bigger picture here, harmless attention-baiting or not.
All of this rancor aimed at litblogs and even litjournal greats such as The Paris Review completely disregards the impending death of not only the printed word, but also any kind of writing that isn't immediately handed to the masses in the much more easily palatable medium of film. And n+1 even acknowledges this oversight in the now-infamous (in small circles) editorial in question:
People might have used their blogs to post the best they could think or say. They could have posted 5,000 word critiques of their favorite books and records. Some polymath might even have shown, online, how an acute and well-stocked sensibility responds to the streaming world in real time. But those things didn’t happen, at least not often enough. In practice, blogs reveal how much we are unwitting stenographers of hip talk and marketing speak, and how secondhand and often ugly our unconscious impulses still are. The need for speed encourages, as a willed style, the intemperate, the unconsidered, the undigested ... The language is supposed to mimic the way people speak on the street or the college quad, the phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satisfaction [sic]—"The Divine Comedy is SOOO GOOOD!"—or displeasure—"I shit on Dante!” So man hands information on to man.
The damning evidence
“And here I must desire all those critics to mind their own business, and not to intermeddle with affairs, or works, which no ways concern them; for till they produce the authority by which they are constituted judges, I shall deny their competence to pass judgment.”~Henry Fielding, TOM JONES (1749)
What n+1 fails to recognize is that in this time of a myriad different media/entertainment possibilities, the great majority of that entertainment dollar/minute is going to give a fuck less about a 5,000 word essay about anything (how many of you have already stopped reading this post?). It all comes down to targeting an audience and talking to that audience. Example: If a generation does not reproduce, eventually there will be no future generation to replace it. The same holds true for readers in general. If young people don't start reading, eventually nobody will, because who is going to instill the great value of reading anything outside of the back of a cereal box if the older generation doesn’t instill this value in them? Which makes anything n+1 says completely irrelevant and out of touch with what truly matters. If you don't like what a so-called “pufflit” blog such as Susan Henderson’s Litpark is doing, go elsewhere. There are placesforthesnootierofus on the web. For fuck's sake, it's the internet after all. And all of the above links are, by the way, mentioned in the n+1 article as being good but “overlooked” critical blogs. This despite the fact that they all have far more visitors than most every litblog on the net. What n+1 seems to (willingly) overlook is that three minute sound bites are what sells these days and can even (shock!) smack of intelligence. There is no better proof of this on the web than Zefrank’s stellar video blog “The Show”. He has regularly (every day for the past year), succinctly and in far fewer than 5,000 words come up with insightful and probing revelations about politics and our culture in general. In his August 29 entry, Zefrank accurately and deftly (and awesomely) explains in less than three minutes the devolution of the American attention span, saying:
“Everything's a potential brand! Think about your grandmother. Feel it? Right, that feeling is your grandma's brand. A bunch of experiences contributed to the making of that brand, like making good cookies. And tucking you in. And chasing you under a table when you called your uncle an alcoholic. But that emotional aftertaste is no longer dependent on any of those experiences. Unfortunately that emotional aftertaste you feel when you think "grandma" isn't all that successful of a brand. In order to be successful, a lot of people have to experience something related to the brand. I.e., who the fuck is your grandma? If a lot of people do have those brand experiences, there have to be similarities in the emotional aftertaste they engender. Lastly, for a brand to be successful, its emotional aftertaste has to be stronger than the more general brands that are associated with it. Your grandma, unless your grandma is Grandma Moses, isn't as strong as the general brand "grandma." But "grandma" is a stronger brand than the more general brand "old people." That's why you can sell cookies using the general brand "Grandma's Cookies" but would have a hard time selling "Old People's Cookies." Right now, platforms are fracturing. There are fewer specific places that have access to a large market share. It's getting harder to speak to lots of people. But the shared emotional aftertaste of brand is platform-independent. If you leverage those aftertastes, people will pay attention, regardless of where they are. And whether the emotional aftertaste is good or bad is irrelevant! As long as they're watching.
“Most people believe that if any shot goes unanswered it must be true.”~Chris Matthews (yes, THAT Chris Matthews, of MSNBC’s Hardball)
That being said (in a wide-eyed, caffeine-injected manner), we aren’t the first blog to take umbrage with the blatant elitism displayed by n+1. There are others such as The Millions, who said,
When n+1 stoops to the kinds of gross generalizations and straw-man-thrashing we are accustomed to seeing on the covers of the newsweeklies, it threatens to undermine its own mission. Anyone looking for an Ebert-style thumbs-up or thumbs-down on Dante will no doubt find one on the internet. Google will even tell you how long the search took. Blogs both reiterate and catalyze the coarsening of the culture ... the dumbing-down, the, uh ... whatever.”
Millions even goes further, pointing out the hypocrisy displayed by n+1 in this campaign against anybody who isn’t them:
Why would its (n+1) editors seek to penetrate the citadels of Random House and Doubleday? Why would they run ads for HarperCollins? Why would they continue to publish? (Why would they demand 5,000 word critiques of favorite records?) Obviously, some accommodation with the system has been reached, and more power to n+1 for continuing to fight the good fight. But to call out others for their own accommodations is to devolve to the level of intellectual pissing match. Despite (or because of) such stimulating missteps as ‘The Blog Reflex,’ the journal provides a much-needed antidote to the inanities of consumer culture. The biggest danger would be for n+1 to fall through the trap-door of elitism…
Uh…too late. And then there’s Eric Rosenfield of Wet Asphalt, who bluntly calls n+1 “the worst literary magazine on the market,” saying:
n+1 is run by a cadre of pretentious, arrogant assholes with strange and insupportable ideas about literature and criticism, with Keith Gessen chief among them. Let us not forget that n+1 is the organ that thinks normal people go on $130 dinner dates, get paid $40 an hour for copy-editing, and sleep with 10 people on a ‘busy but not extravagant Spring Break.’ Elif Batuman's article on the short story, which takes the problem of workshop fiction and somehow deduces that the problem with these stories involves too many proper names and implied familiarity—again, a perplexing, weird conclusion.
To imply that the lit bloggers are somehow in the pocket of the publishing houses just because those publishing houses send them review copies, and give them recognition simply doesn't follow. In fact, that argument is better applied to profession newspaper and magazine reviewrs [sic], such as n+1 editor Marco Roth. After all, they not only get free books, they get paid to write about them by giant corporations, who themselves get advertising money from the publishing houses.
A shout-out to the intelligencia...right on the cover!
The Valve, a blog n+1 professes to admire (to whatever degree n+1 can admire anything that isn’t them) says, “The pettiness behind his (blogger Mark Sarvas’ The ELEGANT VARIATION) decision to publish Gessen’s emails proves the editors of n+1 correct: some lit-bloggers do turn bellicose when their authority’s questioned…” Perhaps, but in Noveltown’s opinion (learned at that!), this article/essay (close to 5,000 words! (though many, touché, are not our own words)…do we get a cookie anyway, n+1?) isn’t a case of a litblogger turning “bellicose” because our authority’s been questioned, it’s a case of calling a pompous ass a pompous ass.
But Wet Asphalt and The Millions (even though it eventually capitulates and gives n+1 far more credit than it deserves) are in the minority. Most of the litbloggers who even know that n+1 exists and have taken the time to respond have done so on the cowering defensive. And any of these bloggers responding defensively to n+1 are really only exacerbating the problem. There’s Literary Kicks, which mutedly states, “I hope we (litbloggers) have the opposite effect, and I can think of a few public debates we've managed to smarten up recently. I think it's hilarious that an n+1 editor should feel so superior to literary bloggers. That's not the way I add things up. Personally, I know without a doubt that I'm a good enough writer to be published in n+1, if I were to put any effort into it at all.” Awww. We could all get published wherever we wanted if we just put our minds to it. I’ll keep that mantra handy.
Then there’s Conversational Reading (whose very name seems to conjure up what n+1 professes to be the death of “high-brow” lit): I think what they wrote about litblogs was unfair in that it lumped everyone together and relied on a lot of straw men. Frankly, I find some litjournals embarrassing. Do I judge n + 1 by them? No. So please don't judge me by the bottom of the barrel either….I think the litblog world could use a little honest, intelligent criticism. A couple of the remarks I've heard from n + 1 have struck home, and I've tried to consider them and think about how this blog could be better….I resent the idea that this blog, and a number of others, are PR hacks in pursuit of review copies.
Best thing Esposito says:
I also don't know how well n + 1 understands blogs. They seem to be under the impression that longer is better, that short, quick posts are somehow necessarily uncivilized, as though it's a physical property of them. But blogs just don't work like that. Often in the blog world, short and sweet is what's required. Moreover, with the medium's requirement that people post often (daily or more), long isn't always possible.
BUT THEN THE CAPITULATION (ARRGGHH!):
Should people say stupid or uninformed things? Of course not. But sometimes a few well-placed words is [sic] just what a blogpost needs, and just what readers want.
So maybe Snoop Dogg expresses our sentiments even more clearly, even more eloquently than we ever could in the following clip (substitute the word(?) n+1 every time the name “Bill O’Reilly” is mentioned):
So there you have it. To us here at Noveltown, all this hoopla smells suspiciously of a shallow (and transparent) attempt at garnering publicity. I guess we're going to contribute to this publicity like anybody else addressing the ludicrous and myopic assertions of n+1, but you don’t have to buy the journal, or even acknowledge it’s holier-than-thou existence. We know we won’t.
“I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”~William Burroughs
Nah. They aren’t. Sounds more like the last gasp of a fast-becoming irrelevant breed.
“Second-rate minds usually condemn everything beyond their grasp.”~La Rochefoucauld
Could (gasp!) n+1 possibly be second-rate? All we know is that their website looks like it was put together by a freshman taking a web design 101 class. So yes, they could be second rate. Possibly third. But no lower than 4th.
“Helping out his conjuring tricks with imperfect light, distracting noises and a certain amount of intellectual hanky panky, he pretends that he has proved what he has merely stated.” ~H.R. Trevor-Roper
n+1 has made quite the name for itself among the small group of bloggers who have chosen to engage them in this debate for whatever ultimately self-defeating reason. But in the end, after all the dust settles, there is only the sound of desolate prairie wind, the sound of n+1 sucking air. As Literary Kicks points out, “If n+1 thinks bloggers like me are a step below them on the evolutionary scale, they may want to take another look at the straight odds here. Remember, it's survival of the fittest in this literary game, and we've got computers.” Check and mate, bitches.
Is the National Press Club saying bloggers are not journalists? - By N.L. Belardes
Do bloggers fit in with the elite D.C. media circle?
On a day when Lithuania bloggers made news in America, I can’t help but think fellow bloggers might be interested in an overlapping tale.
I’ve never considered myself a journalist, though I did recently try to join the highly touted National Press Club in Washington D.C.
Seems the Lithuanian parliament isn’t the only entity saying bloggers aren’t journalists by refusing accreditation to applicants. Last November I applied to the National Press Club on a tip from a friend of a National Press Club VIP who thought bloggers might be allowed into the fold. I would have never tried on my own. But I figured, why not? It was a friend who brought up the idea anyway.
I’d already been beating the local paper to minor news stories, even provided fodder for news junkies interested in stories that made national headlines out of Bakersfield: creationism courses making headlines in nearby Frazier Park, immigration marches on the streets of Bakersfield, political prop 85 protests, and the bombing of children on Maple Street just one street away from where I live in Bakersfield’s Oleander area.
So I spent a hefty $100 and went through the National Press Club’s application process. Easy enough. It was a simple online procedure that took just a few minutes. I was asked to follow up. I did that in a lengthy email.
I didn’t hear anything back.
Four months went by and I had pretty much forgotten about having applied. Out of sight, out of mind I guess. Besides, I was still going to do what I was going to do—be a feisty blogger—with or without the consent of the National Press Club.
About week ago I inquired again. This was a non-refundable hundred-dollar investment on whether I could label myself a journalist by National Press Club standards—literally a hundred-dollar question. I thought those were only in the movies.
So the National Press Club lost my follow-up email. No big deal. Could happen to anyone. I found the message and resent. I linked up to my Emilio Estevez article on the film premiere of Bobby. There I had been standing with the press, a holy monk, a seer along with the rest of the mystic gathering in the press room. I not only asked Estevez a poignant question, I even took video. I thought it was journalistic; blogger meets journalism meets novelist. Maybe I should have sent them the Modesto Famous piece. Talk about some digging for that work of blogospheric art!
Maybe that article would have failed me too. Am I really just a citizen with a blog? Just… a… citizen?
OK, I’m joking. I know I’m sort of a soloist in a sea of media.
Hey, there are a lot of people who fly solo. The media farms stories off non-accredited sites, buys film footage from others. Yet these people aren’t considered journalists. What are they, we, me? Hackers? Who is this journalist locked up for his San Francisco protest video? Did he even have a blog? Is he a journalist?
I’ve never called myself a journalist, so I’m not worried. I have used the term ‘citizen journalist’. And I have had articles in trade journals, and magazines.
Doesn’t matter. The Paperback Writer blog eventually got rejected. Case closed for now as they say in the Anna Nicole diaries…
I did receive a nice rejection:
The Membership Committee reviewed your application again after receiving the additional information you submitted and unfortunately they concluded that you do not currently qualify in any of the membership categories. We thank you for applying to the National Press Club and hope that you will continue to utilize our services as a guest.
Once again, since my blog isn’t newsworthy to the National Press Club in Washington D.C., it shouldn’t matter that I reprint a simple rejection, right?
Yet I can’t help to wonder how many already in the National Press Club write blogs or are affiliated with them… And what was it about Paperback Writer that made them toss me in the bin of rejection?
Is it because I’m in Bakersfield, or maybe it’s too much Op. Ed., or the big baby blue background? I wrote the National Press Club to find out what they thought.
No response yet.
So I went to some people who I thought might give me some opinion…
I asked Howard Owens, Director of Digital Publishing at Gatehouse Media, Inc. if he considered bloggers as journalists. He gives a lot of credit to self-made bloggers out pounding the streets with narratives and digital media blogs:
Bloggers can commit acts of journalism. Anybody who finds something out and reports it is being a journalist. You don't need credentials or a paycheck to do journalism.
If a blogger does journalism and calls himself a journalist, I would consider him a journalist.
Yet Howard recognizes that some bloggers don’t want to be held accountable in the crossover to what some like the National Press Club might consider as legit media. According to Owens, “Not all bloggers want to be journalists. Some are just journalers and happy to be so.”
Owens goes on to say:
All people, whether you call them journalists or not, who self publish, have the same and equal right to free speech and all government protections for protecting sources, gathering data and asking questions.
You don't need a license to be a journalist. You only need the first amendment (and outside the US, as a matter of morals and ethics, you only need its spirit).
I asked Matt Munoz, fun-loving Product Manager of the big Bakersfield blog community, Bakotopia, if he considers bloggers journalists. He says, “Sometimes, but then again it all depends on their mood.”
But what does Owens considers N.L. Belardes and the Paperback Writer blog? Citizen journalist/blogger/novelist? Or... Owens says, “Mostly what you do on your blog I would consider journalism.”
And King Bakotopian, Munoz? His answer reverses that of Owens, “Blogger, but then again it all depends on your mood.”
So really it’s just a matter of opinion even between journalists and journalist organizations. The National Press Club didn’t actually say, “No, Belardes, you’re not a journalist.” Yet I failed in qualifying. So I suppose take that how you want. All that can be said in the end is the National Press Club has a particular exclusivity regarding joining and taking part in their club and club benefits.
And bloggers from Bakersfield might just have a tough time getting in…
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