Online Editors Gather To Talk About Bloggin the Literary World
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The most requested definition in 2004 at Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary site was for “blog,” the company announced Wednesday. Blogs owe much of their popularity to this fall’s presidential election – but wonks and wonkettes are hardly the only ones who keep running diaries of their views on the Internet.
A growing community of bloggers, many of them New Yorkers, track the publishing industry in their opinionated musings instead of goings-on on the Hill. Some are avid readers and others amateur journalists, but the offerings have gone beyond the gossipy magazine chitchat of Gawker.
Literary Web-zine editors emerge from the glow of their computer screens into the sunshine – or at least the fluorescent lights of a bookstore – for a discussion about the book-obsessed blogosphere on Friday at Housing Works. Participants including Maud Newton (www.maudnewton.com), George Murray (www.bookninja.com), Laila Lalami (www.moorishgirl.com), and Ron Hogan (www.beatrice.com) discuss, in moderator Dennis Loy Johnson’s words, “the rise of lit blogs as a phenomenon.”
Mr. Johnson was an early-adopter: He founded mobylives.com in 2000 as a companion to his syndicated newspaper column, which appeared weekly in newspapers and alternative weeklies all over the country. When some print outlets canceled his column as they began scaling back their coverage of the literary world, his site became what it is now, an up-to-the minute compilation of literary news. His appearance on Friday will be his first as “the Moby Lives guy.”
With relatively little self-promotion, the other panelists have become minor Internet celebrities with a coterie of devoted readers – many of them working for the mainstream press. That said, they have their share of detractors among 9-to-5ers: “In the blogosphere, everybody gets to be a critic,” fumed a book critic (ahem) writing in the Washington Post last year.
Despite the aura of popular-kid superiority, literary bloggers rely on the traditional press to a degree. An explosion in readership generally only occurs when a newspaper, wire service, or popular Web site mentions them.
MobyLives, for example, was chosen by Yahoo as a “site of the week” in 2001. Readership expanded immediately and it now receives about 500,000 hits a month. Mr. Hogan’s site, which hovers around 11,000 visits a month, got a push last spring when the e-mail newsletter Publishers Lunch linked to one of his items.
So, after all is typed and archived, do the sites have any effect on those who they critique? That’s what Mr. Johnson hopes to explore Friday. The discussion certainly won’t be about lunches at Michael’s or six-figure advances, though several bloggers have snagged book deals.
Even if lit bloggers aren’t the next publishing-world powerhouses, at the very least they are passionate about their reading. “Last night,” Ms. Newton said, “I dreamed that an advance of the 2005 issue of Oxford American, which contains an essay by Charles Portis, arrived in my mailbox. In the dream, I put it on my nightstand. When I woke up this morning I was sad to see my cat sitting there instead.”
Friday, 7 p.m., Housing Works Used Book Cafe, 126 Crosby St., between Houston and Prince streets, 212-334-3324, free, used book donations encouraged.