Brainiac

Watching established news organizations set up homesteads in the blogosphere is a pastime of great interest to me, both as a professional writer and an amateur social psychologist. Few phenomena better illustrate the role that anxiety plays in the life of large institutions.

In some few cases, the internal culture of a magazine or newspaper will encourage (or at least tolerate) a degree of initiative on the part of the writing staff. But most places are just too inflexible for that. And it shows, at all levels.

The habits fostered by an entrenched bureaucracy combine with hazy notions of “our audience” (often treated with an overblown deference finally indistinguishable from condescension) to yield a rigidity embodying pure terror. There is a clutching at reliable formulas, and a deep fear of the interesting, let alone the unusual. A compulsive avoidance of experimentation sometimes alternates (in an almost cyclothymic way) with joylessly frantic, top-down efforts at renewal.

“Be spontaneous!” comes the directive from on high. “Just not too spontaneous!”

And you see the spastic consequence in the blogs, which should probably be called Unclear on the Concept or Lipstick on the Corpse or Watching Grandma Dance the Frug.

Conversely, things do go well on occasion. A case in point is Brainiac, the new blog associated with the Ideas section of the The Boston Globe.

Ideas runs in the Sunday edition, where it shares the same part of the paper as Books. (Full disclosure: I have written for both sections.) (Like you really give a damn.) Fewer and fewer American newspapers have so much as a full-time book-review editor; and when the Globe launched Ideas a few years ago, it was a very anomalous thing, almost without parallel. The section has done, on the whole, a remarkable job — certainly far better than the late, unlamented, and often curiously idea-free “Arts and Ideas” department of the Saturday New York Times.

That Ideas continues at the Globe is remarkable, given how many newspapers are now cutting staff (with the ones that provide book coverage of any kind shrinking the space for it). The section’s existence ought not be taken for granted. Nor should the fact that the Globe is giving Ideas reporters a chance to blog without some nitwit copyeditor going “Michael Bérubé? Never heard of him.”

So I think Brainiac deserves your support — meaning, your eyeballs. It is available through RSS. So are Ideas and the Books section.

To keep from ending this on a totally boosterish note, I should mention that Brainiac does not allow comments on the entries. Good work, everybody, but if readers can’t respond at all, it’s kind of like watching Grandma dance the frug.