It’s more than just not having time to blog after writing newspaper stories, although that’s part of her complaint, and it’s more than just the fact that blogs are filled (she believes) with meanderings and ephemera of little value. There are two key portions of her rant, as far as I’m concerned. The first is where says that:

“Everyone’s a writer now. Everyone’s an editor … this is the democratization wrought by the Web [and] its chief effect, at least upon journalism, is to diminish whatever craft, and there is some, is left in the business.

It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone can write on deadline. It is not true that anyone can do an interview. It is not true that anyone can edit themselves and sort wheat from chaff.”

We’ve all heard this one before, many times — and it still doesn’t hold water. How does blogging, or the fact that anyone can be a writer or an editor, diminish whatever craft is left in the business? If anything, it should make real craftsmanship even more obvious, since there is so much drivel out there. And as I said to someone on Twitter after a discussion of Blatchford’s piece came up, the fact is that everyone can write now, and we had better get used to it. Not everyone can write well, obviously, and not everyone is worth reading. That’s a different question.

The second key part of Christie’s rant is where she says:

“Journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue.”

This is the least defensible part of her argument, in my opinion. Who says journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation? It wasn’t one in the past, that’s true — or only a “carefully-constructed dialogue” — because we didn’t have the ability to create a real two-way discussion. Now we do. Do some people use it to hurl mud, or for self-aggrandizement, or other useless purposes? Of course they do. So do some columnists and op-ed writers, and we seem to cope with that pretty well.

Loren Feldman told me that he agrees with Christie, and that he likes to read what I write, and doesn’t care about the comments. That’s very flattering. And as I said to Loren, there are some things that deserve to be monologues — obviously, we wouldn’t want Shakespeare to have to wade through dozens of inane comments on the weaknesses of his plays, or subject Shelley or Keats to the same thing every time they came out with a new poem. But you know what? Most people, Christie included, aren’t Shakespeare or Keats, and in many cases there are valuable opinions — and Lord knows, even actual facts — that emerge from comments. That has value.

And speaking of comments, here are some good ones:

“You mean mere readers aren’t allowed to dare comment on the written work of their betters? Get out of the ivory tower. Newspaper writing has long been sub-par (yours is a rare exception) and readers are starting to get tired of being fed hastily-written pap.”

“Ironic criticism from a reporter who, over the years, has subjected her readers to page after page after page of verbose prose ABOUT HER DOG.”

“Tom Stoppard once said that a journalist is ’someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he [she] has arrived to cover it.’ You should chew that over Ms Blatchford.”

and one of my favourites:

“Well I didn’t think too much of the article; but I did find some of the comments very interesting, entertaining and insightful.”

The really ironic thing, of course, is that Christie was born to be a blogger. Many of her pieces, even the ones that revolve around news events and more traditional reporting, have a lot of Christie herself in them, and many of her columns are intensely personal. She also writes a lot — way more than the average reporter or columnist. She is a blogger without a blog. I think she just doesn’t want to have to do it all the time, and doesn’t like the fact that people can comment on what she writes.

Disqus has also made it easier for bloggers to administer their comments, integrating the admin panel right into the Wordpress admin dashboard. The initial version of the Disqus 2.0 plugin caused some problems for me and some other WP users, but within a matter of hours there was a fix — and the whole time it was being pushed out to users, founder Daniel Ha was responding on Twitter and through the Disqus support forum, and keeping users updated. That was one of the first things that impressed me about Disqus, actually: Daniel’s dedication to remaining in touch and both responding to and fixing problems quickly.

Allen Stern at Centernetworks has a run-down on some of the other enhancements, which include the fact that comments handled by Disqus are now “SEO friendly,” meaning that bloggers don’t lose any of the Google juice they might otherwise have gotten — another thing some critics had suggested was a flaw in the way Disqus was structured. According to some previous critics such as David Risley, the new Disqus has more than answered their complaints about the service. Congrats to Daniel and his team on a great upgrade.

According to a post at TechCrunch and one at Alexander Muse’s Texas Startup blog, someone named Deb McAlister, who was once involved with the DEMO conference but apparently isn’t any longer, wrote to Muse and said that an email Jason sent around to his oh-so-private mailing list (don’t get me started on that whole fiasco) with tips for startups on how to do a demo was actually a blatant rip-off of something she wrote for DEMO founder David Coursey about 10 years ago. According to Ms. McAlister, approximately 1,893 of the 2,200 words in the Calacanis mail were “DIRECTLY lifted” from her piece.

How did she arrive at this number? We have no idea, because no one has been able to produce the article in question. As Sarah Lacy and others have pointed out, many of the tips that Jason included (don’t use PowerPoint, etc.) are accepted wisdom in the conference world at this point, and trying to claim ownership over them would be like trying to copyright the Bible. In any case, what possible purpose could this accusation serve? McAlister apparently hasn’t been associated with DEMO for more than 10 years, and current DEMO organizer Chris Shipley wasted no time in throwing her under the bus and disavowing any knowledge of the email. A ploy aimed at plausible deniability? Who knows.

The whole thing is a farce. But I suppose it’s not surprising — TechCrunch arguably started this particular train moving with the whole back-and-forth with DEMO when the TechCrunch50 (originally the TechCrunch40) first appeared, and Mike Arrington said that DEMO “needs to die.” Why not just put on a conference and let people decide for themselves whose is better? Would that be too much to ask?

“We don’t want to oversell it, but we really think that with the help of smart media people like you, we can begin to invert the pyramid of only a few people controlling the global conversation, and figure out new ways to liberate great ideas and great writing for an ever-growing avid audience.”

According to the description by Lauerman, the new Salon site or network is both a hosted blog community and a media hub or aggregator. When you go to the open.salon.com site, you get a “cover page” that features posts from a variety of blogs, as well as a tag cloud showing the most popular tags. The page also shows the most highly-rated posts — since blog posts within Open Salon can be given a “thumbs up,” much like other social-media sites (and some mainstream media sites such as globeandmail.com, which has a “recommend” feature on every story). If you set up a blog, you get to add friends, and then their most recent posts appear in your sidebar.

Salon’s cover page feels a little like the front page of Wordpress.com in a way, which also features some content from the blog network. But Salon is planning to go much further (and says it isn’t “one of those giant, anonymous blog networks): not only will it highlight posts on the “cover page” of Open Salon, but top posts will also be featured at the main Salon.com site as well — an interesting step. And the other big move is that Salon has a built-in compensation scheme called Tippem, which uses the Revolution Money payment system developed by former AOL head honcho Steve Case. Tippem is similar to Tipjoy, which I have installed here on my blog but haven’t actually seen used very much.

I think Open Salon is an interesting experiment for the online magazine to make. Although it has some excellent writers and some great content, it’s been awhile since Salon did anything that caused much more than a ripple as far as online media goes, so part of my interest lies in seeing whether the site can pull this off or not. And Salon has certainly put together some or all of the pieces of a new-media strategy: blogging, a Digg-style rating feature, featured content promoted on the main site, and a micro-payment system. Even if it doesn’t work, it should produce some interesting lessons.

Update:

Editor-in-chief Joan Walsh said in a statement that “Open Salon eliminates the gatekeepers [and] makes our smart, creative audience full partners in Salon’s publishing future,” and she has also posted some comments about the launch, including some links to what she describes as the “excellent writing, photography and art, even music, that we’re already getting — stories and posts and images that are as good as what we publish on Salon every day.” Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg, meanwhile, notes in a blog post that Open Salon is the culmination of a project he started several years ago.