Real Journalism Is Difficult and Bloggers Want No Part of It
<http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=100358>
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One of the interesting things about the endless debates about blogs, blogging, bloggers and bloggosity (to throw, for no especially good reason, yet another word pre-formed with blog...into the mix) is the simple formula that's almost always put to use:
blog = wannabe journalist * bloviation/know-nothingness
As easy targets go, the blogger as inept (or perhaps, I should say, even more inept) "pajama" journalist is among the fattest fish in the barrel.
There's an endless supply of bloviators reading articles in the NY Times et. al. and who, armed with a command of a few paragraphs' worth of knowledge, surge forward to their keyboards to twist and shout.
However, as I've written before, this focus on the 'let's talk about what other media folk are talking about' school of blogging is a strange fixation when you consider the variety of blog types now available.
I think there's a perceptual lag at work here. At first, there was a slow recognition of blogging as a, what should we say, phenomenon? That's too grand a word but it'll serve for now.
Anyway, there was a pre-global warming era glacier-meltingly slow recognition of blogs at all. Having reached a hard earned summit of understanding, there's an even slower recognition that the blogs folk are now yelling about - the parasitic liberal/conservative news watchers - are a shrinking tumor.
And what's funny (at least to me, an easily amused sort of cat) is that before reading the (accurate, let me stress) Phila Inky piece on lazy bloggers and their lazy ways I was over at "Freedom to Tinker" - a blog - learning more about High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection:
<http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/>
So it was funny to read about cluelessness when I was luxuriating, only moments previously, in such impressive clue-fullness(?) at, alas, a blog.
My suggestion for folk who're disturbed by blogs is to, in a mouse and keyboard sense, 'get out more' and browse a bit more broadly.
In other words, fuck "Daily Kos", viva "Cosmic Variance" (Google it).
.d.
--------- "If human beings had more of a sene of humor, things might have turned out differently."
Stanislav Lem