We Have A Winner
Here's a letter to the editor from one John Singh of Oakland. He is at great pains to separate bloggers from actual journalists. Apparently, we fall far short of the high standards found in that profession.
I have nothing to say except we might have found a replacement for Jonathan Klein's quote in the upper lefthand corner. But then we'd have to change our name from Pajama Guy to what...we've been Singhed? Singheads? Singhled Out!?
Ah, let's just keep it as it is.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:04 AM
4 Comments:
Don't change the quote in the corner! I think it's dangerous to assume that everyone already knows the connection between blogging and pajamas.
How was he wrong?
Here are his most obvious problems:
His indictment of bloggers is too broad. There are many bloggers on location doing excellent, professional reporting. Also, there are many blogs where experts in various fields can get together and discuss their subject at a high level. Even blogs that just editorialize are often as good as or better than the editorials you'll find in the top newspapers and periodicals. (And a lot of blogs come from professional journalists--how does he deal with that?)
He overstates the quality of professional journalism in general. It's often quite shoddy, even at the highest levels.
Many of his complaints are irrelevant--quaint, actually--since he fails to recognize that blogs (as opposed to papers and magazines) operate on a different model and therefore one approaches them for different things and with different expectations. Furthermore, his blindness toward blogs makes him miss certain things they can do better than the mainstream media. For instance, they have a lot of people on the ground, people with expertise at practically everything, and are therefore very good at the kind of stuff that falls through the cracks and also at noting errors made by the mainstream media that would otherwise go unrecognized.
And let's face it, the guy's a whiner.
If he truly wants "the journalism profession [...] to continue to thrive and be meaningful to our society," he'd better learn how to work with blogs, not curse them.
To add to LAGUy's list, Singh does not give a single example of blogging as bad journalism. Now I don't think blogging is journalism, it is a different animal. But if you will critique it for being bad journalism it would be nice to cite some examples.
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