Harriet Changes

A little over a week ago, the Poetry Foundation’s blog Harriet changed its format. For the past bit of time, Harriet had been manned by visiting writers who would set up shop for a few months to post regularly (most recently ACR favorites and upcoming  Craig Santos Perez and Thom Donovan). These writers posted generally mid to long form posts on a wide variety of poetry-related topics.

Now? Harriet is a link-dump, which is kind of a bad sounding name but isn’t necessarily a bad thing to have. The reason for this is this supposed revolution in how we get and share information:

Recently, though, we’ve noticed that the symptoms of this revolution have changed.  The blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook.  News of the poetry world now travels fastest and furthest through Twitter (as the thousands of followers of @poetryfound, @poetrymagazine, and @poetrynews can attest), with the information often picked up from news aggregator sites rather than discursive blogs.

I think that in a sense this is right. I get links from Twitter (or I used to when I used my account regularly) and from Facebook.  But what I think this reasoning is ignoring is that that mid and long form article/post/information does still exist somewhere. We don’t really get our information from Twitter. Yes, maybe we do when an award is announced or some other sound-bite worthy bit of news. But what is being passed around are the longer articles, where these supposed “most vibrant interactions” are going on. It isn’t actually happening on Facebook; Facebook is where the links to these things are being shared.

Maybe I’m just not in the right circles, but everything that I get through Facebook and Twitter directs me to a place like Harriet used to be where the community and interaction is going on. What do I see on Facebook? Comments like “cool link” or people clicking the Like button. Rarely, if ever, does a true conversation break out on Facebook because typically that post only lasts high enough on the news feed to be noticed for an hour at best.

So what I am disappointed about is that one of the better end-points where these posts/articles/interactions/conversations happens is now over. Especially because I think all of the above can exist through Harriet: have somebody man the Twitter account to deliver news updates and links; have somebody man the Facebook account to do the same; continue to have the great posts on the blog; and if you feel the need for a link-dump, have a daily link dump as one of the posts. Perhaps that is beyond the resources of what Harriet is given; maybe part of the decision was based on changing the financial state of the blog.

That being said, I am glad that the blog is pointing outwards more, and so far it seems to be pointing toward a good variety of topics and locus points of conversation. I’m hopeful that this change will be a positive and interesting development, especially as the new format finds its legs.

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