“I read lots of food blogs, for instance, but is there a food buyer or a general manager writing a blog somewhere? Publishing-industry blogs that are about the business rather than the books? Other great industry blogs?”

– Ezra Klein, Washington Post

Anyone who works in the field of public relations or communications, as I do, should be thrilled to read this.

It isn’t new to observe that if a company or an executive publishes a quality blog, then some people will find it. What is new, though, is that if a company or an executive publishes a quality blog, then journalists like Ezra Klein really want to be told about it.

I have an opinion. It’s controversial. It’s definitely the minority position. It will undoubtedly subject me to ridicule amongst my peers. And it may even cost me some business. Nevertheless, I can’t shake myself from it.

Et cetera, et cetera. Sure, it’s a blog post about the relative importance of search-engine optimization in marketing plans for law firms, which doesn’t strike me as too controversial. But one could apply the lede as a boilerplate to most pieces of self-published copy. Unless, of course, the copy in question is oriented toward refuting multiple contrarian views of the conventional wisdom.

Which (actually) is what the post linked above does. How meta!

Not unrelated to the pleadings of one journalist, I’ve made due on a resolution of sorts to redesign this site.

It turned out about as visually vulgar as I expected it would – I’m not a web designer – but two primary reasons unrelated to making pretty pictures led to the redesign: I wanted more flexibility in how content is presented, and I wanted to teach myself the basics of the WordPress self-hosted platform.

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For sure, you need to be armed with a rebuttal for the next time someone makes an irritating joke about a blogger and a lawyer walking into a bar.