On 3/28/07, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Sure. No problem. So here's my question. Why is Teresa Nielsen Hayden, the former managing editor for the biggest science fiction publishing imprint on the US, ever an unreliable source for a question about publishing? Or, put another way, what is it about Movable Type that somehow corrupts her words when her speaking the exact same text aloud at a transcribed lecture or in an interview would be OK?
Your implication that she is always a reliable source about publishing is as misguided as the assertion you are arguing against, that she never is. A big problem is that you fail to distinguish that for which she is a reliable source.
Her blog is *always* a great source for her opinion. It may or may not be a reliable source for fact, and is probably not most of the time, no matter how often she's actually right.
As to your point about where her words are published, yes it does make a difference. When what she says comes from an interview and is published by an intermediary, we have that intermediary's reliability to hang our hat on. When what she says is delivered in a lecture, we have the host's reliability to hang our hat on.