[Bud Parr, from the blog 'Chekhov's Mistress', entry dated May 24th 2007]:
I’ve been more quiet than usual during the most recent spate of condescension aimed at bloggers. I have been reading it all and taking in all the responses, and wondering when it will end. Not, I suppose, before I moderate my panel next week at BEA on book reviewing and blogging.
The fact is that I couldn’t take Shannon Byrne seriously when she so tritely called bloggers “parasitic microorganisms”, because she or her co-horts at Little, Brown send books to bloggers in hopes of attention. I can only assume she didn’t really mean it because that would make her a hypocrite as well as a dullard.
But I do take Richard Schickel seriously; he’s an established critic and has a vested interest in the state of book reviewing. There must be something to what he’s saying. My inclination after reading these attacks (after lashing out!) is to try to write better so that at some point these people will have no fodder. But that’s kind of silly of me. Blogs are what they are and as good as they can be, they’re nothing like newspapers and never will be. In some cases, as we’ve seen, blogs act as a farm team for mainstream publications, but in most cases, they’re something quite different.