Look, the "labyrinthine maze of nonlinked bylines and PR department messages and institutional contact forms" on many publications' sites is awful, it's true. But I don't know that the answer is this sort of "engagement."

If I had time to talk to people at work, I'd pick up the phone or answer their emails. (OK, maybe I wouldn't pick up the phone. But still.) I don't need an even easier instant communication channel for "PR professionals" to abuse.

'Cause let's be honest: In the majority of cases, that's who would use this to contact me right now. My email address and phone number are posted out in the clear on the websites of both mags I edit, for anyone to use—and maybe one out of every 100 outside emails I get on a daily basis is from a real, live human being without a PR agenda. I know: Increasingly, even sending an entire email is too formal for many ordinary humans. But if perceived formality or inconvenience are problems for readers wishing to connect with me, alternate means of communication are already at their disposal that are both less formal and more convenient.

As much as I personally dislike using Twitter as an instant-messaging app, and inasmuch as PR blasts and SEO/social-media con artistry abound on that service, too, it certainly serves the needs of anyone connected enough to have access to a realtime iPhone connectivity app. Not only that, with Twitter, you're allowed to silently separate the conversational wheat from the chaff. The idea of giving PR hacks another conduit to demand attention in realtime, especially in the name of "media accountability" or "customer service," raises my hackles.

Also, maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this just going to be yet another social-media message notification funneled into writers' already choked inboxes? If not, what sort of system will be in place to ensure that writers respond? (And do we really want to set up systems that mandate writers' response to nonsense?) Or is this just another glorified Web 2.0 comm widget?

Psh. I didn't get a writeup in Folio when I got promoted. Whatever.

Saw this bit in Paul Krugman's NYT blog:

Sadly, that's exactly what so much of political reporting is these days: Asking the big guys what they think about the other big guys' (and occasional gals') performance, rather than their merits. Which, among other things, is just way too meta. "How do you think [he or she] came off at [his or her] [X] appearance?" "Do you think [he or she] contradicted [him- or herself] when [he or she] said Y?" These questions are so unnecessarily granular, a way to bury us in details at the expense of the big picture. And I suppose, looking again at the bottom line, a way to keep writers getting paid for churning out minuscule little tidbits.

Is all of this "industry" worth it?

That's the subtext of this blog post, which I wrote the night of the 2008 vice-presidential debate. Amid a crowd of microphone- and recorder-wielding professional reporters asking former New York mayor and presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani his thoughts on how Sarah Palin had come across in the debate, I'd played my part, wearing a little red blazer and wielding my own little recorder, and gently pushed my way to the middle of the scrum. Then I'd asked what I was later told was a "bush league" question:

It was a gotcha question, to be sure. An artless question, a question lacking in strategy or timeliness. It was all of those things—but it was also a question I genuinely wanted answered. I'd wracked my brain trying to think of something Giuliani could tell me about his support for Palin that I would actually be interested in hearing, and that was it.

He gave me the courtesy of a momentary pause to hear my question—then caught my eye for a moment, squinted balefully, and resumed his talking points. As he moved on, I stood still and let the crowd flow around me.

A thought at once vaguely comforting and amusing:

"These people...they'll need copy editors, won't they?"

Ah, good ol' mediated culture.

Welcome, New York Times, to the reality I discovered five years ago.

I'm a journalist, and I have opinions.

(See: This, this, and this.)

To further clarify what those opinions might be, I've gone through my Twitter feed and compiled a list of 10 biases I think my posts there exemplify.

I've long liked the idea of creating a personal statement of bias. Full disclosure. 'Cause in the world to come, that is your raiment, not some trumped-up, imagined objectivity. There's a reason people mock Objectivists. Why shouldn't they also mock journalists who pretend to have achieved such distance from their citizenship? Not even the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics demands that journalists do things like abstain from voting.

I made a rather clumsy attempt at something like this back in college, with significantly less than stunning results. ("Irascible ranting" is probably the best way to describe it.) More recently (and more lucidly), I also wrote this on the subject.

The list I compiled this week isn't a mea culpa; actually, some of the items may be reminiscent of the tack taken by the would-be job-seeker who, upon being asked the classic question about "your worst workplace mistake," turns the question around: "Well, there was this one time when I was overly zealous in defending the personal liberties of my fellow Americans..." It makes me wonder whether I'm even thinking about the question the right way. But the list I came up with is more subtle and more encompassing, I think, than a rote recounting of positions on an arbitrary checklist of contentious "issues."

On to the biases.

This is item No. 9 in The Daily Telegraph's list of Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences:

Pro tip: When correcting someone else's work, get your facts right. There is no such car as a "SmartCar," at least not as named. In addition, even if the aforementioned SmartCar does exist, well, I'm not sure what style guide they're using over at the Telegraph, but I would guess that "20km" isn't proper. Also: The "when" beginning the phrase "when fleeing from the police" should be capitalized, as it begins a complete sentence.

Talk about short-sighted; it's laughable to see The WSJ, an unsustainable old-model media company, suggesting that bloggers, whom it claims are already able to turn a profit by writing, might want to consider further credentialing themselves via formal training and/or unionization. Yes, because those things have done so much for the viability of dead-tree media.

To see how that might work out, one need look no further than the farce that is our own local bloggers' guild. The bloggers most up in arms about "protecting their content" are quite often those whose content is the least worth protecting—and those most concerned with establishing themselves as authorities possessing specialized knowledge of the "rules."

The whole point of blogs is that anyone is qualified to write one. Not only members of a guild or press corps. And there are no rules, only recommended practices. The whole enterprise is meant to be democratizing. Further, those who want to raise the bar to entry have failed to notice something crucial: The psychological bar to entry for blogging is already incredibly high.

The most interesting thing about this recent TechCrunch article, for instance, was its use of the phrase "formal blog post." A blog is far too much responsibility for most people, who continually apologize to their audience for not having enough to say until, two to three months later, they finally throw in the towel. When even sending an entire email or typing up a coherent argument now strikes many as too stiff and formal, where exactly would we find warm bodies to man a credentialed "blogger corps"?

Why are those left aboard the ship seemingly incapable of thinking beyond the whole "send 'em off to school and slap a label on 'em" model? If it works, it works—no need for credentials.

"I am pressed, printed, stomped, and strategically removed—I am everybody. Insane without innocence; I am trapped, tricked, packaged, and shipped out. I am produced. (Pressed, printed, stomped, tripped, trapped, tricked, packaged, shipped...)"

The other day at lunch, a colleague asked an interesting question: "If you could be any writer, who would you want to be?" Everyone else at the table quickly rattled off a list of names of magazine columnists, essayists, and writers they admired—but I was honestly kind of stumped. Disconcerted, I've been turning the question around in my head ever since.

I mean, I'm a magazine editor. I read stacks and stacks of magazines growing up, was greatly inspired by a handful of book authors in my teens, and got into a bunch of comics writers and artists in college—but I'd be hard-pressed to list off many dead-tree magazine or newspaper writers I particularly care about. I know along the way I've liked certain writers' styles, and saved copies of certain columns for my files, and I'm sure I've picked up tricks here and there from a number of them—but for the life of me I can't remember most of their names!

But yesterday, it finally occurred to me: If you flipped the question to ask me about my favorite Internet writers and essayists, I could rattle off a full complement. Paul Graham. Jessamyn West. Matt Haughey. Alex Zola. Orson Scott Card. Andrew Baio. Bill Keaggy. King Kaufman. Nate Silver. The writers of n+1 mag. The McSweeney's crowd, for starting down that path in the first place. And a bunch of people whose real names I don't know, like dirtynumbangelboy, jonmc, grumblebee, and ikkyu2.

I'm suppose I'm not bereft of inspiration after all.

Hey min? I think "Top 5 Worst Mag Title Names Ever" might be the worst story title ever. What are "mag title names"? Have you ever heard of synecdoche? Or synonyms? What were you thinking? Better would have been "Top 5 Worst Magazine Names Ever."

Also, in this article about layoffs at TheStreet.com, you said the company estimates laying off 18 people will save the company $2.4 million. Does that mean those people were seriously earning an average of $133,000 apiece? Or is there some other explanation you neglected to print?

Finally, the title of the email I received from you today was more than a bit creepy. Seriously: "we can make your phone ring"? All lowercase? I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop: "we can make your phone ring...with our minds!" Or something. Because otherwise, your claim fails to excite; anyone who knows my phone number can make my phone ring.

Thanks for thinking of me, though.

Edit: Half an hour after I commented on that top story, the title was changed to "Top 5 Worst Mag Names Ever." Good deal.