Blogs Need a Bad-Writing Intervention

The same law of the universe that says any article, e-mail, or blog post making fun of a spelling mistake or grammatical error will itself contain at least one spelling mistake or grammatical error decrees that any blog post that insists the Internet is killing good writing will itself be badly written. In an effort to circumvent that rule, I will hold off musing on blog writing as thing-in-itself, which would get vaporous very quickly, and concentrate on a single narrow question: Was Elizabeth Spiers right when she decided that it would be a waste of money to hire editors to clean up the New York Observer’s blogs, since it’s better to have ten sloppy posts than five pristine ones? In other words, is Michael Kinsley right that on the web, no one cares if you write like a dog?