Cathy Horyn: "I Don’t Think a Lot of the Blogs are Distinguishing Themselves by Linking and Just Being Snarky or Being Opinionated"

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The folks at Refinery29 caught up with New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn in San Francisco. They picked her brain about the state of fashion media—and Horyn noted that there's a problem with recycling content online. Well, we're just going to go ahead and reblog (even though Horyn isn't keen on reblogging) what she said:

You’ve been talking to some of the Academy’s fashion journalism students while you’ve been here. How do you feel fashion journalism has changed over time and with blogging?

“It’s a lack of original content. Sooner or later, it’s like anything, people change, people look at that and say ‘This is boring.’ And some young journalist will come along and distinguish themselves with original reporting. And they will hopefully be fluent in French and very good at reporting what’s going on at the luxury goods companies and the big brands in Europe, because there’s a complete need for that kind of reporting. You can be tough and feisty and a little bit of a guerrilla reporter, for want of a better word, and I think there’s a need for that. I don’t think a lot of the blogs are distinguishing themselves by linking and just being snarky or being opinionated. Do some reporting.”

To be honest—and here's us, just "being opinionated," we guess—it's always been our opinion that, just as there are different kinds of print outlets, there are different kinds of blogs that serve different purposes, and lumping them all together probably isn't fair. There are service-y blogs, personal narrative blogs, personal style blogs, mood-board/inspiration blogs, reportage blogs, blogs about business, print-offshoot blogs, gossip blogs, celebrity fashion blogs, the list goes on and on. Then there are blogs that try to bring together great news and content all together in one place, for readers who don't have time to trawl through 150 different sites everyday—we think there's a place for that in the blogosphere, for sure.

And on the language note, we'd suggest, in lieu of French—which, sure, is useful—if you only have time to learn one foreign language in the near future, Chinese might be the way to go. That is, if you're interested in reporting on breaking news stories on luxury, retail, the biggest emerging fashion market on earth, and stuff like that.
· Cathy Horyn To Aspiring Journalists: Be Reporters, Not Re-Bloggers [Refinery29]