Stefanie C Peters

As regular readers will have noticed from the series of Stratford-upon-Avon themed articles this week, I was in Shakespeare’s hometown last weekend. I attended a conference on “Reviewing Shakespearean Theatre: The State of the Art,” which though it focused on issues surrounding reviews of productions of Shakespeare’s plays, brought out two concerns about blogging.

Photo by cambodia4kidsorg on Flickr.

Blog=bad writing

A panel of experts on Saturday fortuitously held both Andrew Dickson, the online arts editor for The Guardian, who also blogs, and Michael Coveney, the well-established theatre reviewer for the Daily Mail, whose negative opinions on blogging were soon aired.

The discussion on blogs might have been informative, but it soon became clear that Coveney’s definition of blogging is something like: “bad writing published online.” He went on to connect this to what he sees as young writers cheapening the profession by writing for free online.

I have two points to make:

1. There is bad writing in print as well as online. There is more of it online because the Internet makes it easy to self-publish, but quality, well-researched articles written by trained writers and journalists are published online every day. Blogging is a form, not an assessment of value.
2. Emerging writers have had to write for free since before blogs were invented. Many publications find it difficult to be profitable and cannot pay writers; and in some cases, publishers suppose that since we love writing, we would do it anyway, or worse, that they are doing writers a favor. Believe me, young writers want to be paid just as much as anyone.

The future of many publications will be online. Good writing will continue to be esteemed whatever medium it appears in.

Preservation

The other issue that emerged is more puzzling. The academics at the conference worried about the availability of theatre reviews published on blogs for future researchers. Newspapers can be archived and scanned to microfiche and thus preserved. But the Internet is ephemeral. Once a blog is taken down, it disappears.

How can blog content remain accessible in the future? It may have been archived by a web server somewhere, but that doesn’t make it accessible for future readers. For now the safest way to preserve content is still in print. There must be another answer.