The Huffington Post
I don't know what the big deal is really. There's good stuff on there and a lot of it. Many are up in arms because the celebrity pundits aren't allowing comments. True but they might. I'll take Shafer's view over Finke. She was too quick on the draw on this one for my taste.
Oh and CNN's blog reporter Abby Tatton called Roger L. Simon a "conservative blogger" today. That's my take on him as well as I've said.
Oh and CNN's blog reporter Abby Tatton called Roger L. Simon a "conservative blogger" today. That's my take on him as well as I've said.
posted by Mark at 5:17 PM
4 Comments:
I was in no rush to inspect Arianna's newest self-promotion machine, but elsewhere someone mentioned David Mamet's "incoherent rant against computers." I was curious to read that, so I went to Arianna's 300-person coffee klatsch and, because the site is not searchable, spent an hour to find Mamet's little piece, which is rather typical of most of the posts there: short and undeveloped.
On KCRW's Left, Right & Center, Arianna's always going on about the clueless, clubby, insular media. It seems to me that that's exactly what she's done here. She's invited all her Hollywood celeb friends, some fellow liberal pundits, and extended an olive branch to a couple of token conservatives like David Frum to maintain the illusion of balance.
With 300 people posting, I skipped and skimed a lot, but I found very little that engaged me or makes me want to return.
It's quite extensive I'll say that. That may be the biggest impetus to success. Piling on as some have is unwarranted in my view but Ruttan aired the legitimate gripes he found.
"It's quite extensive I'll say that. That may be the biggest impetus to success."
No, I think the sheer number of contributors is a problem. Who wants to read an Op-Ed section of the newspaper with 300 editorials, most written by people who share the same sensibility?
Another problem is that Arianna hasn't selected people because of the inherent worth of their writing, but because of their established reputations. Her thinking is this: if one famous person will attract readers, 300 famous people will be that many times more attractive. But many of the people she hosts are uninteresting and overexposed, have nothing novel to say and don't deserve a platform. Do we really need former Paramount president Sherry Lansing telling us that schools should hire retired people to fill teacher vacancies? Talk about out of touch liberal condescension. Now that Lansing's out at Paramount and has made a bloody fortune as a studio executive for three decades, maybe she should try teaching. Ignoring the fact that schools only want credentialed teachers, which requires two years of post-graduate studies and several grueling competency tests to acquire, which is what deters many from pursuing teaching to begin with.
Should Dennis Prager really get another venue from which to bloviate? I wish he'd go away.
Arianna should have spent some time and hired some editors to read blogs by people who don't have a famous name but who have something fresh to say, but that would have required a lot more work than jusr rounding up the usual suspects by consulting her party lists.
It deterred me from teaching that's for sure. There may indeed be too much content. people can comment on the newswire though.
Post a Comment
<< Home