Back in the late 1990s, I briefly joined the National Conference of Editorial Writers while I was working at an e-zine called IntellectualCapital.com, which we liked to think of as the op-ed page on the Web. At the time, many NCEW members held the freewheeling Internet masses in contempt. I was among the few who didn’t and had some rather pointed debates over the issue with my skeptical colleagues.

I had forgotten that I wrote an article about the issue for the NCEW magazine, The Masthead, back in 1999. I just rediscovered that article online. It’s as relevant in today’s era of blogging and social media, where the power of editorial gatekeepers is greatly diminished, as it was more than a decade ago, so I’m going to reprint the article. Here it is:

Old Advice For A New Age
The Masthead
March 22, 1999

By K. Daniel Glover

A half-century ago, at the first convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, renowned newspaperman Henry Louis Mencken admonished our founders with these words: “No editorial writer,” he said, “ought to be permitted to sit in an editorial room for month after month and year after year, contemplating his umbilicus. He ought to go out and meet people.”

Simple words (with the exception of umbilicus!), simple message: Get out of your ivory editorial tower and listen to the people lest you make a mockery of your profession.

Mencken’s message retains its relevancy today, which explains its presence within the corner of cyberspace we know as NCEW Online, and it is a message every online (and perhaps offline) commentator ignores at his or her own risk. Why? The one-word answer: interactivity.

You see, there are no ivory towers on the Internet. “The people” have rejected both the editorial elitism of the past and the hit-and-run punditry of the present. They have demanded a voice in the national discourse, and the World Wide Web has given them that voice — one that often is unfiltered and unlimited.
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