“Not all online writers are the same”

Timothy Gray at Variety has an article of interest to bloggers: “It’s time to clear the blog fog”. Some excerpts:

The Lapps have at least 50 words for snow. Yet we have only one word for bloggers. Clearly, we are doing something wrong.

“Blogger” encompasses myriad online writers. There is the guy in his pajamas pounding out personal thoughts from his basement; a person who has created his or her own website to report on events; a one-person diary; sites where a group of people weigh in; and a person writing for an established news organization.
It makes no sense for them to be lumped into one word.

And rather than just citing a problem, Gray proposes some recommendations:

According to Advertising Age, 19% of kids aged 12–17 have their own blogs. (Should we call them klogs, for kid logs? Togs for tween-teen blogs?)

They shouldn’t be confused with Variety’s reporters and editors or the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, for example. Since these writers are pros, we could call them prologs. Perhaps, in honor of our Scandinavian friends, we should label this group as Lapps, i.e., folks who do Lucid and Professional Postings.

Since there are some genuinely mean people online who only enjoy denigrating others, can we call them floggers?

Okay, make that tongue-in-cheek recommendations. But it reminded me of a recent conversation with a colleague who tried to pin me down as to what precisely GITS was. “Yes, a blog, but what kind of blog.” And as we talked, I realized just how squarely I have tried for 2+ years to keep the focus of what we do here on one thing: screenwriting. Yes, I talk about movies and industry news, but almost always I try to steer the conversation about screenwriting.

Pretty obvious, you might say. After all, the tagline at the top of the page says, “Screenwriting blog…” But I think it’s important to remember from time to time why we’re all here — to become better writers. 

And so as I do every so often, let me open up the floor to ask:

* Are there things I do on GITS that you’d like to see more of? Less of?

* Is there some subject area I’m not covering you’d like to see on GITS?

* Am I missing something? A better way to connect with screenwriters, both aspiring and professional? 

And circling back to the the Variety article, if you had to come up with a specific blog moniker for GITS, what would it be? SCROG: SCReenwritingblOG?

Uh, I don’t think so. Just typed in “scrog” on Dictionary.com and this is what I found.

Scratch “scrog.” What else can we come up with?

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