By Net standards, the media bumble in yet other ways. If you’re a newspaper or magazine journalist, you may have been reared to neuter yourself about The News; no opinions online, please. On the Net, however, many people are suspicious if you do _not_ join the crowd and speak out. They dislike net-thropologists; that is, media people and others who study the Net rather than contribute to it. Among some journalists the standard modus operandi is to post questions for an article, then vanish without sharing anything with the Netfolks. Happily, this is changing somewhat. In fact, you can find a few journalists from the _New York Times_, _Wall Street Journal_, _Washington Post_, and other major papers speaking up online about matters dear to them. Recently a reader flamed the _Post_ for its Internet coverage (“what those idiots at the _Post_ write isn’t worth minimum wage”). Alluding to software that can screen out messages from offensive people, reporter John Schwartz punched right back: “It’s bozo filter time.” He had been using online services for years, and here, it showed. The old stereotype, in which all members of the major media are clueless, just doesn’t fly any more. Not too long ago somebody shared a _New York Times_ article—discussing some other people’s proposal for a national digital library—with hundreds of a members of a list devoted to law in cyberspace. He did not ask permission from the _Times_. A pithy reference to copyright law then emanated from none other than Peter Lewis, who had written the article and was a regular on the list. So how are Netfolks treating Lewis nowadays? He e-mailed back an answer in prose worthy of a discussion group on the Internet itself: _It took me a while to get used to being flamed by pencil-dicked geeks who hide behind their terminals, saying things I’m sure they’d never dream of saying to my face. But now I’ve become something of a connoisseur of flamage, and while I regret that it is widespread on the Net, I regret more that the quality of flaming is almost uniformly weak. I now savor good flames and ignore the rest. On the other hand, it took me almost as long to get used to having instant feedback, often pointed and critical and right-on, to my writing. While there is a danger of a “chilling effect” from flamage, perhaps subtly influencing reporters to back off a subject in anticipation of a flood of “Dear Clueless” letters, I think the overall benefit of instant and widespread reader feedback is a Good Thing. Perhaps all rookie reporters should be required to write a Net story just to let them know that they do not write in a vacuum, whether their beat is the Internet or the police station or sports._