The Wandering Blogger

Steve Coll reflects on the blog he is now giving up in favor of more long-form work. He's onto something here:

By far the most fun I had with this format came when I was on the road. Last summer I was in Africa and Indonesia. Taking half-assed digital pictures for Think Tank and writing diary entries redoubled the already uplifting experience of reporting from those places. If the new journalism arising from digital formats can compensate a person adequately for wandering the world in a taxi with an iPhone, I will happily surrender my nostalgia for newspapers, magazines, and books. I’m not suggesting that the writer’s satisfaction arises from the same work as the reader’s, but even so…

Travel-blogging really needs some support. In my view, foreign correspondents should be encouraged to blog - or better still ex-pats in distant lands should become free-lance bloggers, telling us about the worlds they know, and finding aggregation outlets to disseminate their insights.