You Know the Blogosphere Is Real When …

Although I’ve been writing journalism in one form or another for a long time, I would like to think that I am not the kind of journalist who makes friends or family uncomfortable about saying something casually that that they don’t want known publicly. That said, it does happen that someone will mention something over dinner, e.g., and then quickly say “Now, that’s off the record” or “That’s not for public attribution.” I’m pretty sure I’ve never violated that trust, and I hope I never do.

Something along these lines happened yesterday — three separate times, to my amazement — but, even more to my amazement was the twist that accompanied the request for retroactive off-the-record status. On three separate occasions, involving three different people in three different locations, someone said something interesting to me yesterday and then quickly followed with: “Now, that’s not for the blog, please.”

The blog? This little thing?

I didn’t even know that these three people read the blog. I was, of course, happy to honor their request. (Even though the three pieces of information were in fact pretty juicy, none of them were really appropriate for this blog anyway — well, maybe one of them was, but since that discussion was also governed by an NDA, it was very, deeply off-limits.) The biggest takeaway for me was this: the blogosphere is real in a way that none of us, journalists or economists or parents or cops, could have imagined a few years ago.