Jeffrey Rosen leaves the blogosphere
Our estimable GWU law school colleague, Jeffrey Rosen, tells NPR that he has foresworn blogging forever after getting into hot water with a piece about Sonia Sotomayor.
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.”
“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. …
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 Dan Drezner and I define a blog as:
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.
Comments
Much of what bloggers do - including by commenters, such as me - is somewhat like the example I learned in law school back in the early 1950s to explain why “res gestae” could be admissible evidence despite being hearsay:
“Res gestae is spontaneous like the yelp of a cat when its tail is stepped on.”
Posted by: Shag from Brookline | June 1, 2009 06:29 AM
Notice what Rosen has done here: when rightfully criticized for an abomination of a column (see Glen Greenwald for a comprehensive critique), Rosen states that it wsa “only” a blog post, thus implying that the medium, and not the writer, is to blame.
“Had this damned meat cleaver not been in my hand, I wouldn’t have killed my wife!”
“But you were supposed to use it to cut me a piece of steak.”
“That’s it, I’m not using stupid meat cleavers anymore.”
By the way, the TNR itself introduces Rosen’s piece on Sotomayor thus:
“This is the first in a series of reports by TNR legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen about the strengths and weaknesses of the leading candidates on Barack Obama’s Supreme Court shortlist.”
Is a “report” equivalent to a blog post?
Posted by: mrjauk | June 4, 2009 03:20 PM
Notice what Rosen has done here: when rightfully criticized for an abomination of a column (see Glen Greenwald for a comprehensive critique), Rosen states that it wsa “only” a blog post, thus implying that the medium, and not the writer, is to blame.
“Had this damned meat cleaver not been in my hand, I wouldn’t have killed my wife!”
“But you were supposed to use it to cut me a piece of steak.”
“That’s it, I’m not using stupid meat cleavers anymore.”
By the way, the TNR itself introduces Rosen’s piece on Sotomayor thus:
“This is the first in a series of reports by TNR legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen about the strengths and weaknesses of the leading candidates on Barack Obama’s Supreme Court shortlist.”
Is a “report” equivalent to a blog post?
Posted by: mrjauk | June 4, 2009 03:22 PM