I appreciate that there’s great value in give and take, even in a face to face debate, but I have to agree wholeheartedly with Erick Erickson:
But I have a new pet peeve. The number of printed word institutions that have decided to take a bunch of people with faces for radio and voices for print and turn them into podcasters is too much.
If I go to a newspaper for news, please put it on the printed page so I can skim it. I don’t need your twenty minute rambling to get to the five hundred words of useful insight. Too many print outlets and digital outlets are expanding into podcasts to make money off you. It’s all about monetization, not about the user-friendliness, appropriateness, or quality of the content.
As I write this I’m listening to the Dishcast, a relatively new feature of Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish, and I’m fighting so hard to understand Sullivan’s relatively clear accent, and this week’s guest’s bad audio and thicker accent, Irish-born Russia expert Fiona Hill, that I’m not really getting much out of it – this seems to just be a long kvetch session, but maybe I’m missing important points. Like, when she bid Andrew goodbye with “thanks, Sanjay.”
It’s true that Sullivan’s beginning to issue transcripts, and in fact I’m pushing through Sullivan’s interview transcript with Michael Schellenberger, a self-described former far-leftist who has become disaffected over issues ranging from energy production (he’s pro-nuclear, as am I, if a trifle more cautiously) to the subject of the interview, dealing with the drug abuse problem – he sees leftist kant on the matter as ineffective, and the leftys themselves as deceitful.
But the interview just goes on and on, with them interrupting each other, backtracking, and all that other shit a good non-fiction writer knows better than to record for posterity. It’s driving me nuts, and usually I just take a break when I’m really annoyed, and so I lose the thread. I’m actually planning to reread parts of the Schellenberger interview transcript just because I know it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to keep it connected in my head.
And this is where a writer can boil it down, draw out relevant details, and in general present a story that gets the point across without exploring pointless dead-ends, setup and knockdown strawmen, and all the other babbling we humans do when we open our mouths without a script in front of us.
