Interview with Eric Berlin, Blogcritics Executive Producer

This is the third interview in a series that will end with the analysis of normative questions around Blogcritics.org and blogosphere in general. To read the interview with Christopher Rose, click here, and for the interview with Lisa McKay, click here.

Eric Berlin is Executive Producer at Blogcritics.org. Eric has been with Blogcritics.org since August, 2004 and is the publisher of BC Network site Online Media Cultist.

Can you tell me about your current role in BC and how you came to be involved with it?

Well, I am the Executive Producer at Blogcritics. I take the position to mean doing whatever it takes to move the site forward and take it to the next place, wherever that next place happens to be.

I had been writing a sort of e-magazine by the name, Dumpster Bust, in 2003 and 2004 and I would distribute it to friends and fans via e-mail list. Then in November 2004, I started an eponymous blog. It had just been a month since I had started the blog when I discovered Blogcritics.org.

It was an extraordinary moment — I'll never forget it. I simply couldn't get over how great it was to have a community where writers from all over the world could congregate and write about pop culture and politics and everything in between and chat and argue and laugh and hang out.

I got pretty involved, pretty active right away, and became an editor a few months later I think.

It was apparent to me from the very beginning what an enormous value that BC offers to both writers and readers. As a writer, I noticed that my own writing was improving, that I was reaching a much larger audience than I ever could have on my own, that I could access free review materials, and most of all, I was making connections and even friendships with great, interesting, wonderful people from all over the world.

I became an Executive Producer somewhere around the late summer of 2005 and moved into helping provide editorial oversight, though over time my role has evolved to mostly take on business development and public relations.

Tell me a little more about your decision to blog under real name plus what do you do for your "real" job?

I use my name because I want to present who I really am, "expose" my writing and the person behind it.

Article Author: Spincycle

Spincycle is interested in questions around media, governance, and political economy. He strongly values reading good fiction for he feels that it imparts the important value of empathy.

Visit Spincycle's author page — Spincycle's Blog