Today begins 31 days of blogtastic fun – daily posts in the run-up to the wrap up of this project (though the blog itself will live on). It’s a blog about blogging about the farm, right? Or that’s where I meant to end up. There’s so much to explore in these final weeks.
Here’s one: Is blogging an exercise in narcissism?
“What do you think a blog is?” wails the character Julie Powell in the film Julie and Julia. “It’s a blog. It’s me, me, me day after day.”
It’s the personal, though, that keeps people reading. We want to see the personality applied to the day to day. The singular perspective on politics, survival, raising four children, cake disasters, tulips, cancer or cooking. I think that’s one reason traditional journalism suffers from lack of readership. Readers look for a connection to the person writing.
The journalism — the writing in general, actually, that I am most attracted to reading has the author in the story: After we concluded the interview, I asked her why she focused on roses. She looked wryly at me and patted my hand. See? The writer is there, in the story. And in the blog.
