Uneasy Rhetoric

First and foremost, bloggers are best at navel gazing. Most of us could tell you exactly how many strands of lint we have in our navels at any given time and could wax poetic about how they got there.

Joking aside, there is an excellent post over at Blue Oregon taking issue with a column in the Oregonian by Regina Lawrence, a political science professor at Portland State University. The shell of Lawrence’s argument seems to be that bloggers are attempting to take over the role of the mainstream media. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s still caught up in the idea that bloggers think they are journalists. Sure, some of them are, but many more of them are not, and will say so.

Jeff Alworth writes that Lawrence misses the point, and in so doing, eloquently states something I have been trying to say for a long time:

But the biggest mistake Lawrence makes is confusing blogs as just another content-delivery medium. This is a mistake the MSM [mainstream media] has made from the start, and they do it at their peril. The reality is that blogs are the first organic, interactive medium. They are focal points for ongoing conversations.

And further along, Alworth hits it out of the park:

Blogs are a poor substitute for newspapers. Few of them are hosted by professional journalists, and most of them depend on newspaper reportage to craft their posts. … But blogs aren’t trying to deliver the news. They’re trying to make sense [emphasis in original] of the news.