The mainstream media and blogosphere both have their fans. Fans on both side recite positive and negative vignettes - researchers proffer their numbers and writers play the action.
A recent example of this action pictures the Wall Street Journal's editorial features editor Joseph Rago's salute to the work of journalists as opposed to blogger-generated info. Rago was quoted, "The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps."
Blog lovers must admit - some blogs are pretty sad versions of "information", at best. Considering that the huge majority of blogs are Mom and Pop enterprises, or worse, the meanderings of a single unedited mind, it would ruffle any professional journalist's feathers to be compared categorically to the blogosphere.
Aside from pure information, bloggers necessarily have the edge in personalized "expressions", niche musings, and "local" blab - which are all big pastimes in our well-fed milieu.
Journalists can denounce many of the blogworld for a lack of objectivity, knowledge, etc. This may be a bit like comparing the stuffiness of the Opera to the scruffiness of the County Fair. Yet, both Mainstream Media and Blogs serve many useful functions. Intellectuals, politicos, zealots of every bent need a place to read and comment - just as do teenagers, idiots, and criminals. (Before you assign me to a dungeon like pigeon-hole, remember I left out soccer-moms and the mentally ill.)
THIS is all well-monitored and has its ultimate good side, and its darker side. Like society, it's the mobs that get the attention - whether of the boardroom or of the alley.
By the way, major, well-moneyed organizations all have blogs. It's a MULTI-MEDIA world! Domini, Domini - here's your Rolex. (Aw shucks - I could have had eternity.)
Arthur Browning began his career teaching technical writing in a small Midwestern university for 15 years. He later edited and published a national professional journal for some ten years. He is now an investor. His interests include art collecting, web marketing, writing.
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