Professional Gossip vs. the Blog

"With the whole world writing gossip, where is the place for the professional gossip?" asks columnist Liz Smith in a New York Times article. It's a good question, another observation about how blogging has changed the way we communicate.

I was the Chief Copy Editor of the New York Daily News in 1976 when Smith launched her column there. She says now that she had her doubts about taking the job at the News because she thought gossip was dead. Instead, gossip began a transformation then, one that continued as Australian media mogul Ruper Murdock bought up American tabloids and molded them aftre their more outrageous British and Australian cousins.

Now gossip is one more thing being transformed by the web, and it will probably be decades more before we fully understand what that transformation means for us.