Forthcoming New York Times Story on Academic Webloggers

I have an email from Pamela Paul of the New York Times:

I am very eager to get in touch to talk to you about my story about academic bloggers. Basically, I am profiling 7 of the most prominent and influential blogs written by professors and yours is one. I have interviewed every other professor for the story (Becker/Posner, Glenn Reynolds, Juan Cole, Greg Mankiew, Eugene Volokh, Ann Althouse) and I really want to speak with you as well. I will profile your blog no matter what, but it is so much more interesting to readers and informative if I can include your quotes in the piece. If you get a chance, please do let me know when we could talk and I promise I won't take more than 5 minutes of your time.

I'm thinking of offering her one single quote to be used on an all-or-nothing basis: use it all or use nothing. Perhaps:

I think that what those of us who see ourselves as the best webloggers are doing is an experiment in trying to shift the focus of America's public sphere away from celebrity journalism--Peter Baker's New York Times Magazine article of last weekend comes to mind--and toward the policy substance. We all agree that this job ought to be done: it is the policy substance that really matters for Americans' lives and Americans' futures. And we all agree 100% that our press corps is failing to do it.

I remember how back in 2004 it was Greg Mankiw's turn to be unfairly caught in an absurd media-political firestorm. As he puts it, the "reporters writing the stories universally acknowledged in private that [what Mankiw had said] was both correct and unremarkable on the [policy] substance." Yet the reporters claimed that "as journalists they were obligated to cover the political reaction"--and, in their minds, covering the political reaction meant doing so without foregrounding the policy substance. Why not foreground the policy substance in their "politics" stories? I think it was because doing so would have made both Republican Dennis Hastert and Democrat John Kerry look like idiots--and that was a thing that few reporters for mainstream publications and no editors really wanted to do.

Whether we will collectively succeed or not in the long run is anyone's guess. But I think it will be a better world if we collectively succeed.

What do people think?

FYI, I remember Pamela Paul writing:

Raise the Price of Toys: [M]any of us lament the fact that elementary, high school and even college students today seem creatively bankrupt, bereft of problem-solving skills, and completely lacking resourcefulness. Is it any surprise when we cater to them from infancy with a barrage of cheap toys. That they treat their playthings carelessly, fail to value material goods, and become indifferent to waste? And that they then complain of boredom as they get older? Kids would be a lot better off getting five new toys a year and playing with them 50 different ways. The best toys, after all, are the ones that look most "boring" from the outside. A good rule of thumb is that toys should be 10% toy, 90% child. It's what a child puts into a toy that counts. Take plain wooden blocks. At two months, a baby chews on the block and learns what wood tastes and feels like. At six months, he learns to throw the block and at ten months, he bangs them together. By age four, he is building castles and bridges. Toys are so cheap that it's hard to rationalize not buying them. But perhaps we need to raise the price of toys so that parents and children learn to value them again...