In a WSJ OpEd piece, Josephe Rago says:
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.
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren’t much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Interesting article, although clearly linkbait, and it can be placed generally in the category of MSM whining about the democratization of journalism. I didn’t expect this out of the WSJ. Full article here.
The biggest irony is that the piece is of poor overall quality: it uses needlessly flowery language, it doesn’t advance any new arguments, it fails to explain the old arguments cogently, and it sorely needed some judicious editing. If that’s the best the MSM can do, blogs have already won.
There is plenty of room for both mainstream and grassroots journalism but it sounds like Josephe Rago doesn’t “get it” or his article is just linkbait.
It’s funny how these kind of statements rely on the fact that you can use the word “blog” for both Techcrunch and my little sister’s Skyblog. Blogs can of course confront the digital age. Or produce minimal reportage. Or be completely useless.
But isn’t the same true from the MSM? How many magazines are actually interesting/constructive/ethical/well-documented in a news booth? Maybe 5% (I hate Sudoku so my ratio is pretty low
.
Sounds like this debate stays on the fair side when it is about the MSM (I never hear anybody bringing the tabloids when discussing the objectivity or ethics of the MSM for example) and goes off the road a bit when it’s about blog (where the bad examples always get put forward).
Who cares anyway. It’s happening, WSJ article or not.
Interesting. It must be very difficult, having this mindset, to then see such deplorable outlets attract the same thing media does – advertisers, scoop, PR pitches and recognition from business as value. Ouch. I don’t blame journalists for being pissed – afterall, they paid all that money for college and here others who are just as good at writing – but maybe went to school for something else (or not at all) – are taking away their eyeballs.
Interesting, Mike.
I posted some time back about Blogs being like the remora, but in my example it was to point out that the Shark doesn’t eat the remora because it’s a symbiotic relationship.
The WSJ neither understands the shark/remora relationship, nor the blogger/MSM one, I guess.
You didn’t expect pompous nonsense from the WSJ Opinion page? You must not read it very often.
Or like, ever.
“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.”
Rather like this post, no? Two sentences of blogger commentary attached to two paragraphs of quoted MSM commentary.
I have to agree with the article. Bloggers provide commentary.. NOT journalism. Bloggers comment on stories that others have researched and put together. It’s a rare occasion to see a blog post that gives an actual journalistic report rather than just linking to another article.
Don’t get me wrong, I think blogs are very valuable for their commentary. But if you’re a blogger, please don’t think that makes you an equal to a MSM journalist too!
I don’t see how someone who hired a professional writer for some of the same reasons this guy is outlining can find this pronouncement curious.
I think the guy’s absolutely right; most blogs are complete shit. This is one of the very very very very few exceptions.
The guy commenting above me, Thomas, hits it pretty well on the head, as do others.
The function of well over 90% of blogs is to pull together stories that they steal from MSM outlets into one niched place on the internet, along with some irrelevant and pretentious commentary by the author that no one cares about, along with some even more irrelevant and unimaginably pretentious commentary in the comments section that -really- no one cares about.
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