Other Writers

It’s fun to meet a lot of other writers here at the Poptech Conference and especially mainstream journalists and see that they do good work and work hard and I must say, I have a lot of respect for them. It’s been interesting to watch people like Nic Mokhoff from EETimes and Jeremy Wagstaff from the Asian Wall Street Journal take pains to do their writing – that is, find a quiet place, avoid interruptions and really get things done right in the middle of the social and intellectual whirl of the conference. I find that a helluva challenge and also between listening to speakers, using the IRC chat channel, using the inter-conference chat at Poptech, answering IM messages and blogging, I don’t know how any of us have time to write a word.

I really dislike the “rugby match of journalists versus bloggers” and who’s better – I think it’s a silly, pointless argument. (True, making political journalists accountable for their sometimes biased or lax reporting is a noble aim, but I won’t take it much further than that.) I think we all work hard and I think they do work harder and with many more constraints than bloggers – real deadlines, real editorial scrutiny, real paychecks that need to be earned, real hardships in real dangerous places at times (not Camden, Maine here at PopTech to be sure).

I don’t mean to go all Pollyanna-ish on you, but we can learn a lot from one another and I don’t want to start the conversation with journalists by telling them we’re cool and they’re not – what’s the point – and it’s not true as well.