Our estimable GWU law school colleague, Jeffrey Rosen, tells NPR that he has “foresworn blogging forever”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104754798 after getting into hot water with a “piece”:http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=45d56e6f-f497-4b19-9c63-04e10199a085 about Sonia Sotomayor.
bq. The article was used to bash the judge’s prospects even before her formal nomination. But its author, the noted legal writer Jeffrey Rosen, says he’s been burned by the episode, too — enough that he’s swearing off blogging for good. “It was a short Web piece,” Rosen says now, sounding a little shellshocked. “I basically thought of it as a blog entry.”
bq. “Short” for Rosen, the legal affairs editor for the left-of-center New Republic magazine, was more than 1,000 words. “The Case Against Sotomayor” was posted on the Web site of The New Republic on May 4. He quoted unnamed former federal law clerks who had worked for Sotomayor and her colleagues. Some seemed quite high on her skills and her possible nomination. But he also cited the concerns of others about the intellectual rigor of her legal writing and her demeanor as a judge. …
bq. Above all, Rosen says he’s drawn a lesson from how his initial essay was treated by people of both ideological stripes. He won’t be blogging any more. He wants to spend more time with the material before hitting “send.”
The interesting question though (for me as a political scientist who studies blogging) is whether or not Rosen ever actually took up blogging in the first place. As NPR’s writer hints, a 1,000 word commissioned essay for _The New Republic_, which goes through its usual editorial processes, is usually not considered a ‘blog entry.’ In our “article on the politics of blogs”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/publicchoice.pdf Dan Drezner and I define a blog as:
bq. a web page with minimal to no external editing, providing on-line commentary, periodically updated and presented in reverse chronological order, with hyperlinks to other online sources.
I’m sure you could argue with this definition, but for what it is worth, Rosen’s piece obviously doesn’t qualify under it. It provides online commentary, and has a few hyperlinks, but that’s it. It apparently had significant editing, is not an entry on a blog which is presented along with others in reverse chron that is periodically updated, and so on.
Without addressing the underlying controversy, I will say that I’d prefer not to see the term blogpost become a residual category for ‘stuff I wrote which I wish I had thought through a bit more before I hit send.’ Fair enough that online publishing encourages you to get stuff out quickly (sometimes too quickly) – but off-the-cuff judgments that are repented at leisure are neither an exclusive nor a necessary characteristic of blogging.