Happy blogiversary to Eric Zorn!!

Eric Zorn, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, has been blogging for a year now. His column in today’s Trib reflects on the past year: Skeptics wondered if I’d lost my mind. A year ago this week when I launched the Tribune’s first daily Web log, they pointed out I was signing on to do ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Eric Zorn, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, has been blogging for a year now. His column in today's Trib reflects on the past year:

Eric Zorn, a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, has been blogging for a year now. His column in today’s Trib reflects on the past year:

Skeptics wondered if I’d lost my mind. A year ago this week when I launched the Tribune’s first daily Web log, they pointed out I was signing on to do lots of extra work that would reach, at best, a small fraction of those who see this column, that my new-media experiment was going to stumble over the barriers of old-media conventions and that the project was going to haunt my every waking hour. They said I was jumping down from my perch and turning myself into just another bloviator in the unregulated, highly idiosyncratic and often preposterously self-indulgent crowd of bloggers. I answered that blogs are a hot medium with nearly endless opportunities for columnists who want to incubate, tease and follow up on ideas that may not fit into the allotted daily rectangle. I’ll have a blast and we’ll make it work somehow. It turned out everyone was right.

Read the whole thing. Jeff Jarvis is quoted, and he expands on his thoughts in this post, which closes:

In the end, blogging is just a tool — history’s easiest publishing tool connected to the world via history’s best communications network. How can we not all use it?

UPDATE: Henry Copeland has some useful thoughts on this.

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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