Dallas News excerpted yesterday's "CYA" essay for their Vox Pop column. I'm sharing space with Josh Marshall and Hugh Hewitt, and that's pretty fine company.
Talked to editorial page editor Rod Dreher for a few minutes yesterday morning, and this guy is -- I hope -- the future of print news. He's young (about my age), he's smart, and he "gets" blogs. That's the whole purpose of the Vox Pop feature, in fact. It's a newspaper column made up of what bloggers are saying on the day's Big Issue.
That's smart. Or as Rod said yesterday, "a lot of the hot stuff these days is coming from blogs." And maybe even from his own paper's blog. Yep, Dallas News now has a blog written by its editorial staff. Again -- that's smart. One of the big disconnects between editorialists/columnists and readers is that they (the writers) tend to be too damn stuffy. You don't see George Will using many penis jokes, that's for sure. The Dallas News blog lets the editorial staff relax a little, and connect with their readers better.
Check it out.
NOTE: Rod, there's just one thing wrong with your Vox Pop feature -- it doesn't link to the bloggers! And as every good blogger knows, hyperlinks make the blog.
Don't be afraid to send your readers off-site. They'll come back. Trust me.
Nice article. I've been reading Rod Dreher's stuff for a long time. He used to work on NRO before moving to Dallas. He has a great attitude and loads of talent.
I enjoy your blog very much. I try to read it everyday.
Not being permalinked is frustrating, but look at the upside: Rod's quoting of bloggers in The Dallas Morning News is a far cry from the infamous tut-tutting story that Alex Beam wrote in The Boston Globe, just two short years ago.
Nice.
No, let me be more specific: Nice.
Thanks, y'all, for your kind words. I didn't realize we didn't link in our electronic version of Vox Pop to the actual blogs. My job this week has been to put together the op-ed page for the print side while the op-ed editor is on vacation (I'm actually not the editorial page editor, but an assistant editorial page editor in charge of our forthcoming Sunday opinion and commentary section). I'll let the guy who puts Vox Pop onto the site know about the problem. You guys keep writing great stuff, and I'll put you in the paper as often as I can (compiling Vox Pop seems to have fallen to me, which is fun to do). Any bloggers who want to be considered for VP, send me a link to your best and freshest stuff, and please send a jpg at at least 200 dpi. We have over a half-million circulation on weekdays, which means over a million people potentially see your stuff, and your URL.
