When you are a reporter, your focus is on digging up facts to explain the visible and the complex and to unearth and expose the impenetrable and the hidden-wherever that takes you. You are there to inform, without fear or favor. Straight news often has enormous influence, but it's always in direct proportion to how much it informs, exposes, and explains. Opinion writing is different. When you are a columnist, or a blogger in Bojia's case, your purpose is to influence or provoke a reaction and not just to inform-to argue for a certain perspective so compellingly that you persuade your readers to think or feel differently or more strongly or afresh about an issue. That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, "I am either in the heating business or the lighting business." Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader's head-illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew-or stoke an emotion in your reader's heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both.
( Thomas L. Friedman )
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