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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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David Murray blog debuts

Regular readers of this blog will remember my open letter to Ragan Report co-editor David Murray, a post that generated 47 comments. The post was a response to Murray’s editorial comment that PR-focused bloggers needed to back off of their efforts to give the communications profession a push toward recognizing the importance of blogs. Murray—a longtime friend and the world’s youngest curmudgeon—noted in one of the comments that he wasn’t exactly anti-blogging, just concerned that the focus on blogs detracted from more important things, like a perceived decline in the upward communication efforts of employee communication programs.

David was telling the truth. He’s not anti-blogging. Otherwise, he’d have a hard time justifying the introduction of The Speechwriter’s Slant, his new blog.

Well, it’s kind of a blog. It uses blogging technology and it sounds like a blog. But David insists he won’t update it daily: “I feel sorry for bloggers who post their ideas, however thin, every single day, and I feel sorry for the families of those bloggers. I plan to post my ideas, however thin, about as often as I put aside all my writing work and family responsibilities to play golf: Less than once a day, but more than once a week.”

(This is my fifth post of the day. Does that make me “thin?” If so, I’ll take it. It’s been decades since anyone has called me “thin.”)

After introducing the blog, David proceeds to tear into US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (which is fine with me) for his lame comments at the town hall meeting with soldiers. The post is actually pretty interesting, and David is a good writer.

Rumsfeld was badly, overwhelmingly, shockingly out of touch with the mind of the men and women “on the ground,” as the obnoxious abstraction goes. And somebody should have either briefed him, with a hammer, if necessary, about the festering frustration of those troops and the potential for an angry question, or advised him not to do the town hall.

I’ll add David’s blog to my blogroll. What the hell, two more RSS feeds per week isn’t much of a time commitment.

12/22/04 | 2 Comments | David Murray blog debuts

Comments
  • 1.

    I hope this column was not intended to spark discussions as a "clever" tactic for pre-launching the Ragan Report’s David "Blogless-Not-For-Long" Murray blog.

    Update (December 9): The working page featuring a

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