I used to have a blog.
That’s true, that’s not just a thing I’m saying now. But I’ve always been at odds with blogging. On one hand, I just can’t convince myself that anyone should care what I’m thinking about or what I did during the day or who I’m currently disappointing or what I actually want to say about the things that are hurting my feelings or making me angry or giving me intense happiness. That last thing, there should be more of you.
On the other hand, I realize (as much as I realize any one thing) that blogging is Important. It’s how a person interacts with their audience. It’s how people keep up with other people’s lives. There was a social networking world before Facebook, you know, and blogging was what started that world. People would review things. People would talk about things they were interested in. Used to be, if you started a blog, you picked a topic you wanted to blog about, and usually that topic wasn’t “Myself.”
I watched Page One: Inside the New York Times on Netflix Instant, which if I had to guess at its encompassing idea or thesis, was essentially the death of (integrity in?) journalism due to lack of money / the rise of new technologies. The conclusion is sort of inarguable -news media has to fight against itself to keep itself clean, and often it loses.
The documentary was able to hit that part of me that actually made me interested in journalism. As you might know if you’re my parents, I was a member of my school paper in Michigan, called the Update. I did cartoons and wrote funny columns. I couldn’t care less about reporting, or investigating, or getting at the truth. Because the truth was boring. I was in high school. I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to be in college already, where I could be learning how to be a better writer.
Turns out you do all that learning in your head, not college.
I wrote a bunch of stuff after that last sentence but I didn’t like it so I deleted it. Now I’m posting this even though it doesn’t really have to do a whole lot with anything. Oh well.
Go watch that movie.
