Joyce Cohen, the New York Times real-estate columnist — her column is The Hunt – blogs at HuntGrunt, one of my favorite blogs. Part 1 of this interview.

SR: Why did you start?

JC: Because HuntGrunt was too good a name not to use. Also, I started at the time we had The Walk-through. [A Times real-estate blog.] The Walk-through was on WordPress and WordPress sucks. It’s all buggy and glitchy. I had to teach myself HTML to even do it. It was while I was doing that that I came up with HuntGrunt.

SR: Did you think of HuntGrunt?

JC: My very first entry tells you that. You can’t make a diminutive from my name. You can’t make a diminutive from “The Hunt” either.

SR: You’d be JCo. Like JLo.

JC: No one’s ever called me that. HuntGrunt came from Property Grunt. Property Grunt would write to me — to me and about me. He’s a Corcoran broker. Property Grunt was his name and all of a sudden HuntGrunt came to me.

SR: You’re the pure artist who has an idea and has to use it. Your blog is a way of drawing attention to the phrase HuntGrunt.

JC: Without the name HuntGrunt, I’m not sure it would exist. I’m not sure there would be much resonance.

Two days ago, Dubner and Levitt, the Freakonomics authors, moved their blog to the Opinion section of the NY Times website. There was a big announcement on the Times home page. Dubner posted a short and modest note about the move (“we are excited and flattered”). It got over 100 comments, mostly about the lack of full RSS feed (“I thought this move would be good news but the truncated RSS feed pisses me off”) along with a few formulaic congratulations.

So I’ll say it: This is a fantastic accomplishment. Two days ago was a great day for freedom of speech. For the first time ever, someone — actually two people — can say whatever they want as often as they want however they want (long, short, funny, serious, video, text) in the most coveted spot in the entire media world. Levitt took the new freedom out for a spin by posting a what might be considered a big help to terrorists. Nothing like that has ever appeared in the Times or any other major newspaper in the whole history of newspapers, I’m quite sure. Nor anywhere else with a big audience.

David Brooks earned his Op-Ed column, yes, but he was also given it. His influence went way up when he started that job. Were he to lose his column, his influence would clearly diminish. He can be fired, in other words, and being fired would hurt him. Dubner and Levitt, on the other hand, can upset the people who control the Times as often and as deeply as they wish. They can be removed from the Times but it will make little difference to them — it might even help them. No matter what they say, no matter how many powerful people they offend, they will always be able to find a hosting service for their blog and will always have a big respectful audience. If anyone should be worried about offending anyone else, the people who run the Times should be worried about offending Dubner and Levitt. That’s taking freedom of speech to a whole new level.

To the right of David Brooks’ column — which appears twice a week and has a fairly constant length, format, and tone — on the Times website is a blank area. David Brooks controls none of it. Whereas to the right of the Freakonomics blog is the largest set of links ever to appear on the Times website, completely under the authors’ control. One section (5 links) is titled Organ Transplants. Dubner and Levitt believe that the regulations about organ transplants are too restrictive. Given its visibility and prestige placement, that little section is not just a constant reminder of their position but a powerful force for change. It is a new kind of activism. The rest of the Times’s dozen-odd blogs have tiny blogrolls if any, always narrow-focus and never activist.

Quite apart from the tangible power, there is also the symbolism of it: A blog is being given the utmost respect. Blogs are inherently about diversity of voices and the notion that everyone has something to say. Editorials are not (of course). Newspaper columns are not (they are almost always by journalists). Now that the Times has shown a blog such respect, other important places will do the same. The esteem of blogs will rise in the world and, inextricably, so will the beliefs they embody.

Joyce Cohen, the New York Times real-estate columnist behind The Hunt, blogs at HuntGrunt, one of my favorite blogs. I interviewed her about blogging.

SR: Do you like blogging?

JC: No.

SR: Why not?

JC: There’s easy blogging and hard blogging. Easy blogging is like a diary — you want to write about your bad dates or complain about your mother or your boss . . . the kind of thing that otherwise you would do in longhand. Hard blogging feels more obligatory. It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive and the payoff isn’t clear. The technology is still not up to snuff. There are space issues: You can’t quite figure out the spacing to make the picture go in the right place. It’s easy to make a typo and not notice it until later. You can endlessly tinker to make it look good. Sometimes, updates are necessary. In some ways, it never ends.

SR: Why do you blog if you don’t like doing it?

JC: I don’t know. I started. It has a momentum of its own. The more gratifying stuff is the stuff that gets linked to by someone else and commented upon. If Curbed or Gothamist or Gawker links to the blog or one of my stories, that’s interesting. Especially because of the feedback. And occasionally there is something that I want to say.

SR: Many bloggers stop.

JC: I think a lot of people try it and find that there are many reasons not to continue. Maybe it’s not as great as they initially thought. Maybe they started it not really knowing. I’m not sure a lot of people start intending to stop.

SR: Yeah, that would be a small number of people.

JC: Unless you blog because of a particular project. Like if you’re blogging during your kitchen renovation or during your Shangri-La diet or for some very specific purpose like that. I don’t know that people start a blog and say, I’m doing this in order to stop doing it. I think people embark on it not knowing what it’s like.

Robin Hanson has doubts about the long-term value of blogging — especially his own:

My main doubt is whether this will accumulate . . . We get over a thousand readers a day here, and those readers must be influenced somehow. But do those influences add up to a long term net effect?

Consider that before the farming revolution humanity’s knowledge accumulated very slowly. Each person learned a great deal over the course of his lifetime, both by discovering new insights for himself and by listening to others. Nevertheless, the distribution of knowledge in the population hardly changed; each new generation had to rediscover and relearn the same insights all over again.

Before farming, I believe new insights were passed down in three ways. 1. Stories. Stories are to teaching as good food is to nourishment. Whenever I tell a story, my students pay close attention. 2. Apprenticeships. 3. Specialists talking to each other — a manifestation of the Fan Club Instinct. Blogging is a new version of Method 3. When old specialists talked to young specialists, knowledge was passed down. Robin is young, but his posts are influencing even younger persons.

I think blogging is a good use of my time for several reasons. 1. Advertising. I hope blogging will draw attention to my papers and book and future work. Brian Wansink nicely made this point (scientists should advertise). 2. Quasi-reinforcement. Blogging divides a big task (writing a book or paper) into much smaller tasks (writing posts). 3. Data collection. Because of my omega-3 posts, two other people gathered data useful (very) to me. Tim Lundeen’s data led me to study new tasks. Tyler Cowen’s experience with flaxseed oil is enormously important to my omega-3 research.

But I have to agree with Robin that blogging sometimes seems too seductive — that I should write fewer posts like this one and more that fit into the book and papers I want to write. I keep thinking of something Philip Weiss said in his blog: For men, the most enjoyable form of expression is the Op-Ed piece.

In The New Yorker, Orhan Pamuk writes:

The best thing about Istanbul street food now is not that each purveyor is different from all the others, offering his own specialties; it is that these different street venders sell only the things that they themselves know and love.

This is what I was saying about blogs: They are so well-written, so easy to read, because bloggers only write about what they care about.

Did the invention of the piano make the first piano players — the ones who started on harpsichords — better musicians? Probably. Long before blogs, I thought Philip Weiss was the best columnist in America. His weekly or biweekly pieces in the New York Observer were usually original, well-observed, and deeply-felt. He now tells how blogging made him a even better writer.

I had smart readers, whose comments were often better than my posts, and I felt more accountability to them than I had to my print readers. The flippancies and profanities I used to go in for began to vanish. The Internet is not the Wild West, it is more like a great ballroom. Yes, it permits disguise and anonymity, but it is, in the end, a social space in which one’s words have consequences. I felt a sense of responsibility when I finished an item and had my finger poised over the enter key. I stopped posting pictures of my dogs.

Why blogs are better written in general.