William Safire is out today with a New York Times Magazine column on the way bloggers are picking up newspaper jargon. Yep, you’ve just read a “lede.”
This “blargon” in the blogosphere doesn’t surprise me. Quite a few bloggers, not in percentage but in sheer numbers, happen to be present or past employees of the MSM. They carry the virus, which may be spreading to the uncontaminated. I myself go back to the Smith Corona days, and people like J.D. Lasica have, gasp, even been editors on mainstream dailies.
Actually the remaining MSMers would do well to ponder the fate of Smith Carona, aka the SCM Corporation. It brags on its history page about such innovations as “the world’s first Laptop Personal Word Processor,” shown here. With a little more vision, could the company have been a major force in personal computers rather than just word-processors? Or was it unwilling to change its culture to accommodate its new mission? Perhaps. If so, just what does this mean for the newspaper world–with so much hostility still remaining toward user-created content? Could the Safire column itself reflect this in his use of the world “stolen”? One man’s theft may be another’s creativing borrowing in cases such as jargon pick-ups; we’re not talking about robberies frin individuals. Perhaps Safire was joshing, maybe even probably, but I detect some hostility as well.
Meanwhile an excerpt from Safire follows:
Some of our special vocabulary is being stolen from us by the denizens of the world of Web logs. Above the fold–the top half of a standard-size newspaper page, where the major stories begin–now, in “blargon,” is what we see on a blog’s screen before we begin to scroll down. The jump–the continuation of an article on an inside page–is now a place to which the blog’s readership is referred inside the Web site. A sidebar–which we fondly remember as a boxed, related article alongside the main newspaper article–is, to a blogger, a column down one side of the screen displaying advertisements, archived links or a list of other blogs called a blogroll. Even the reporter’s byline, that coveted assertion of journalistic authorship, has been snatched by the writers derogated as “guys in pajamas” and changed to bye-line, an adios or similar farewell at the end of the blogger’s politely expressed opinion or angry screed. (The prevailing put-down of right-wing bloggers is wingnuts; this has recently been countered by the vilification of left-wing partisans who use the Web as moonbats, the origin of which I currently seek.)
