Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

Joseph Rago, the assistant editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal (pay site), has penned a column in which he refers to blogs as “pretty awful,” “downright appalling” and — well, it just gets worse from there.

Rago makes the mistake of lumping blogs the same way many of us lump “the mainstream media” (myself included). And I’m sure that even as I write this, he’s being drawn and quartered on many of those blogs.

But you don’t have to agree with Rago’s dismissive tone to recognize that most of what he says is right on the mark. For example:

“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.”

There are notable exceptions (which Rago doesn’t note), like the burgeoning military blogosphere and sites like Iraq the Model, which provide perspectives not widely available in the traditional press. But for the most part, he’s right. No one’s expecting a blog to compete with CNN in the news-gathering field, but certainly the blogosphere would benefit from more people writing about what they know, rather than what they read in the New York Times.

And yes, I recognize the irony of commenting about a newspaper story in a blog entry that states we have too much of that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 16:50 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.