Life on the Internets
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James Joyner | Monday, June 23, 2008 |
David Kurtz‘ mention that “until Wednesday, I had never met any of our staff in person, including Josh, even though I’ve worked at TPM in one capacity or another for approaching two years now, the last 10 months as managing editor” perfectly encapsulates, for Andrew Sullivan, the New Media world. Indeed, the same’s true for me. I’ve never met any of the current regular writers for OTB, OTB Sports, or Gone Hollywood even though I’ve “known” most of them for half a decade.
Relatedly, I’m increasingly not only annoyed but genuinely surprised when something isn’t available immediately online. For example, I was going to blog an a Csaba Csere piece in Car and Driver that I’d read while waiting at the barber shop but it turns out C&D doesn’t put those columns up until the following month, presumably in an attempt to drive (no pun intended) people to subscribe to the print edition. For me, though, if it doesn’t exist online, it might as well not exist at all.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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You've never met Knapp or Prather? Man, that IS weird. I never considered it. I assumed a more bricks and mortar mindset where you all touched based in person once a week or something.
It's like imagining what a person looks like from their phone voice, and that weird sense of getting it TOTALLY wrong.
The work situation you describe must make it far easier to disagree with your blog-mates. Keeps them a t a professional distance, I would think.
The work situation you describe must make it far easier to disagree with your blog-mates. Keeps them a t a professional distance, I would think.
I dunno. The opposite is probably true. I've met Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Spencer Ackerman, and many other left-of-center bloggers that I cite and debate. That's probably helpful in thinking of them as decent human beings with whom I differ on how to achieve public policy goals rather than "the enemy."
I've contributed at OTB Sports for 2 years and twice guest blogged here at OTB. James and I have never met, and the only time we ever spoke was when I called his radio show once.
Bill
Like tor above, I presume most team blogs have some semblance of physicality. Is your lack of physical contact typical for other sites?
Maybe you should consider a holographic or 2-D projected teleconference, as I recently posed on my blog.
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