Bring Back the 80's!

Bloggers v. Journalists

Barney emailed me a link to an article about a columnist who was bad mouthing the blogging community. I replied to Barney with what I thought, and he said "You should blog that". I didn't feel like it at the time. Blame it on the blogging cycle if you will, but I think I'm so much of a geek I now have no readers. Well I have some readers but they can't get into most of the things that I blog about.

But then, Jake decided to blog about it here: "UtterlyBoring.com: Bloggers are 'net Version of Sad Guys with Police Radios" so I've wagered that getting to play with trackbacks some more could justify the effort of posting what I initially had to say. *sigh* I'm sucha pushover. ;)

I dunno. If I want to hear about the finer points of being a journalist or not, I think I'd rather listen to a journalist than whoever this guy is :) He doesn't build any kind of foundation for his premise or flesh out any permutations. For instance, he doesn't define what a "blogger" is or what a "Journalist" is.. or whether a person could be both, like perhaps this James Lileks fellow he is arguing with.. who appears to be at least as well credentialed as he is. (they are both columnists after all)

The truth is, at the end of the day, credentials do not make a journalist. Journalism makes a journalist. You either research and report facts or you don't. You either present information coherently or you don't. Most bloggers don't claim to be journalists, and most of their audiences appreciate whatever content they publish or they would not be there.

Listening to police radios in your basement is quite a lonely activity, while blogging is about disseminating information, regardless of how small of a scale it is on, and most of the time obtaining feedback therein.

So, I'll bet if this Coleman fellow could get past his knee-jerk defensiveness at not being able to grasp a new trend, he might actually be able to form some useful notions on the subject. At which point, we can all go read them on his blog.