Well damn.

[elisi]

The attack on LJ has reached the mainstream media!

Money quote:

"This kind of attack is something totally new," says Marina Litvinovich, a former government spin doctor who went on to create Russia's main aggregator of blog posts, BestToday.ru. "It is an attempt to uproot not one user but the entire LiveJournal community, which appears to have become too influential, too strong in setting the political agenda of the day."

Indeed, with around 5 million Russian accounts read by some 30 million people per month, LiveJournal has emerged as the country's last truly free and public space for political debate, a chaotic kind of intellectual clearinghouse and the source of not only gossip, conspiracy theories and pro-government propaganda, but also countless revelations of corruption and official incompetence. In terms of the sheer variety of opinions expressed and defended on LiveJournal, it has been leagues ahead of Russia's other media.

Makes me kinda proud. And worried.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

Ha ha, or generational gap. Not that any lack of prep work by a reporter surprises me much but I still recall the outrage that Martin Landau expressed to an MTV reporter who was completely unaware, while covering the release of the first Mission Impossible film, that it had ever been a TV series (and thus wondered who he was and what he was doing there).

[elisi]

LOL! Oh dear, oh dear...