_{Photo courtesy of The Chic Shop}

A lot of you Open Salon folks are familiar with the "flounce" concept:  a blogger here on OS, often one who has been having trouble lately (typically with folks in the comments sections), decides that he or she has had enough, and won't be blogging any more.  Or not here, at least.  Said blogger then publishes a screen wherein they take a wounded attitude, sometimes "more in sorrow than in anger," and seek to instruct all the heathens about the wretched hive of scum and villainy that Open Salon has become.

Maybe some of you are also familiar with "real" journalists--and by this I mean people who are either reports or columnists in the print or television media--who turn to blogging for one reason or another.  Some of these make the transition quite well--I am awed, honestly, by how well Paul Krugman has integrated his NY Times column, blogging, and his Twitter account, and still had time to accept the Nobel--while some of them . . . well, let's just say that they struggle.  And having decided to give up the struggle, they feel they must enlighten us on what a wretched hive of scum and villainy the online community/blogging community/web community/Twitter community/whatever either is or has become since his or her sojourn, and why they are leaving.

They flounce, in other words.

The latest to perform this maneuver is Marc Ambinder over at The Atlantic. Under the rather grandiose title "I Am a Blogger No Longer", Ambinder explains why he doesn't want to blog any more.  Ambinder is a journalist, graduating from Harvard and working for ABC News and The Atlantic (among other things, I'm sure).  He moved into the online/blogging world about 5 years ago, he says, and now he's giving it up.

I'm not a big Ambinder fan, but neither do I have any negative impressions of his work; I simply rarely read it, other than because of a pointer from Andrew Sullivan in his blog The Daily Dish.  But this post has a number of misconceptions in it that make Ambinder's conclusion suspect.  But it also has one great, big ol' mistake, repeated in several places in his post, but which is summed up in his fourth paragraph:

Really good print journalism is ego-free.  By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective.  What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter's insecurities or parochial concerns intervening. Blogging is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view. There is nothing wrong with this. As much as a writer can fabricate a detachment, or a "view from nowhere," as Jay Rosen has put it, the writer can also also fabricate a view from somewhere. You can't really be a reporter without it. I don't care whether people know how I feel about particular political issues; it's no secret where I stand on gay marriage, or on the science of climate change, and I wouldn't have it any other way. What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called "Marc Ambinder" that people read because it's "Marc Ambinder," rather than because it's good or interesting.

And this is the crux of the problem:  Ambinder says he's "required" to put himself in "the narrative", that because he's writing a blog, rather than putting ink to page, he is "compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument."

Oh, bushwah, Marc.

One of the beauties of the online world is that there aren't any rules, requirements, or compulsions.  You can use explicative if you want to.  Post pictures of questionable taste.  Tell the world that you're a Nazi sympathizer or think Timothy McVeigh was framed or that the world is flat or that computers are evil.  You can use active voice, passive voice, write in the first, second, or third person.  Rely on compound-complex sentences, or blurt out your thoughts in ungrammatical, badly spelled fragments awash in factual errors.

You can do whatever you want online, Marc.  Including writing posts that would be exactly the same as those in a newspaper.  You could forgo your byline, if you wanted.  Give us all some of that "ego-free reporting" you admire, and decline to engage any of the Great Unwashed in debate, either via email or in comments sections.

It's your choice.

What I do on my log is my choice, and I do it differently than Andrew Sullivan, who doesn't even have a comments section.  Who does it differently than Glenn Greenwald, who actively engages in his.  Who does it differently than the folks at Talking Points Memo, who have various methods for how they report, comment, and interact on stories. 

So when Ambinder comments about the mean ol' baddies online and how you've grown weary of them because he's  forced, required, and compelled to write and interact in a certain way, it's hard to take seriously.  It's his blog; he's the poitics editor of The Atlantic; over the past five years he could have made of his blog whatever he pleased.

That he chose to make it difficult and exhausting for himself is his choice, not a flaw or requirement of the medium.

So he flounced.  Poor form, Mr. Ambinder; poor form.