An interesting piece on blogging appeared in Sunday’s Observer. Click here to read it in full, but the primary point appears to be one of blogger beware, after dedicated blogger Emily Gould published a lengthy recantation in the New York Times. Gould wrote that “I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire internet.” She also “prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.”
Gould’s mistake – publishing too much detail about her personal life – has been replicated by many other bloggers, according to The Observer. Chief among them was Zoe Margolis, author of the popular Girl With A One Track Mind blog and book (about her sexual adventures). Having been ‘outed’ by a national newspaper, Margolis reportedly said last week: “There still seems a long way to go before people grasp how revealing so much personal detail about themselves can have a permanent impact.”
But Margolis was quick to elaborate. On the same day as The Observer piece, she wrote a post saying that she had been quoted in such a way as to make her sound “negative” about blogging. This isn’t the case, though. Margolis says that she may have been naive but that she agrees with Jeff Jarvis: “The benefits of publicness [of blogging] will outweigh the negatives. The internet is making us more social. And our mutually assured humiliation may make us more forgiving.”
A blogger himself, Blade is hardly likely to condemn his very medium of expression, but what to make of all this? Well, in Blade’s view, blogs are (a) here to stay, (b) increasingly a staple of a serious professional organisation’s enterprise, and (c) a vital adjunct to democracy and freedom of speech.
But bloggers should, if they value their private lives, exercise discretion. To do otherwise is to make a Faustian pact. So far as Blade is aware, and notwithstanding the advent of the blogosphere, the result of making such a bargain has not changed since Goethe published the first part of Faust, in 1808.
There has been plenty written about how employers reportedly use the internet to check up on candidates during the recruitment process. As a recent job-hunter, my tip is that the same technique can be helpful to candidates researching the individuals who will be interviewing them! Touché?
A lawyer of Swordplay’s acquaintance finds himself in a fix.
“My teenage son is to be interviewed by the local constable,” he tells us. “He is alleged to have committed an offence.”
We gasp, for such seems the appropriate response, and then ask: is it serious?
“No, it is not,” our troubled legal friend tells us. “In the great scheme of things, my son’s alleged transgression is about as de minimis as they get.”
For a split second, we wonder if said teenage son is cognisant of lawyerly terms of art such as de minimis, but rapidly conclude that the answer to this question is not a sine qua non of further discourse. And so we press on. That sounds good, we say, relatively speaking, at least.
“Yes,” says the lawyer, “but I am at a loss as to what to do with him. Do I come down hard and ground him, or do I play the liberal card, or do I find a compromise?”
That depends, we aver.
“On what?” asks our man.
On whether you would prefer to deal with your son’s alleged offence as a lawyer, or as a father, or as a father who is a lawyer, or maybe even as a lawyer who is a father.
“I see your point,” says the lawyer. And then, as if to prove that there is no cure for recidivism, he says: “The offence is, after all, de minimis.”
Without prejudice, we add.
Pictured: something out of Kafka. Now there was a man who knew about the law. And had a tough old father, too.
We rarely enjoy pondering Max Mosley – the man, the sins, the legal action, what he stands for – but confess to a degree of grudging admiration for his tenacity in trying to change the law of privacy. As this story from the Independent has it, Mosley has lodged a request with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg asking that, by law, journalists must inform the subject of a story of the private details they intend to print, prior to publication.
We suspect the motor racing man would never have thought it, but he would appear to have an unlikely bedfellow in a certain England footballer. Step forward, Wayne Rooney, who would presumably put his name to Mosley’s petition.
Pictured courtesy of NashvilleScene: some bedfellows are stranger than fiction.
Woe betide those who freelance and fail to return a call.
We say this upon hearing of a normally prolific freelance journalist who picked up a voicemail from an editor at one of the nationals on Tuesday afternoon. Please call us, was the message, and it could mean just one thing – a commission.
Our hero’s habitual practice is to return such calls as soon as is reasonably practicable, as m’learned friends might put it. In practice, that would habitually mean within a couple of hours. Most atypically, and for reasons we have yet to fathom, our man failed to call back for a full 24 hours.
By then, said editor had looked elsewhere. One of our man’s competitors had the gig, an interesting piece about cricket and the law, one which might just be in The Times today and which, we assume, asks whether the Pakistan cricket team have been caught out (in the legal sense, you understand).
We make no judgement on the no ball scandal, save to say that it is a scandal, but in another sense the moral is clear: in the fast-paced world of modern media, he who hesitates is lost.
Pictured courtesy of PrintedClothing.com: a fast-selling shirt.
Southampton FC score a PR own goal
Is Google Street View a good thing?
Skype: coming to a courtroom near you?
Released almost a year ago, Spada’s groundbreaking research report, British Professions Today, is available for free download
In this article, Gavin Ingham Brooke and Rohit Grover of Spada examine the importance of marketing and PR in a downturn.
In the latest of our series of white papers, Spada Research examines trends in environmental reporting.
A cricket ground is a flat piece of earth with some buildings around it.
Richie Benaud, 1930 – present, cricket player and commentator.