Professional Journalists fearing for their Lives desperately scramble to become Bloggers
While bloggers take every opportunity to twitter on about how they have single handedly destroyed mainstream media such as newspapers and television (yea, right!) a more disheartening turn of events is that some professional journalists and column writers have been forced volunteered to start their own blogs out of sheer confusion and fear.
So loud is the hype surrounding what blogging can and cannot do (mostly, it cannot) that real life writers which experience and skill have begun to engage in a very cartesian form of self doubting and navel gazing. “Maybe there is something to this blogging thing. Am I missing the boat?”.
Whatever happened to the column? BBC journalists covering Euro 2008, for example, now have a blog.
Tune into your local or national TV news station. Go to the kitchen and grab your egg timer. Sit down, watch the station and start the egg timer. See how long it takes before someone mentions the word ‘blog’ as a news source. “Bloggers have had this to say about [the flooding in China]..” Do they bother to verify the identity and location of the blogger? Chances are, it’s an american teenager trying to cash in on the events overseas to make a quick dollar from advertising. Here’s a better idea: actually send a journalist to China to talk to Chinese people.
Take a moment to write to your favourite columnist and ask him, nay beg him, not to start a blog. If he or she already has one, then maybe it’s time to have a new favourite columnist.