Jonathan Last, online editor of The Weekly Standard doesn’t like blogs anymore this year than he did last year.

The Last equations are simple. Blogs - good because: 1) they fact check quickly 2) they can elevate obsure experts quickly 3) enable on the spot reporting when something is going down. But Last, like many wanted more. Blogs - bad, because:

Balanced against these goods are the pernicious effects of blogs: They elevate analysis over news-gathering; they value speed over judiciousness; and they encourage the practice of journalism to turn in on itself, to tend ever more toward navel-gazing.

This last bit is the most annoying. Show me a New York Times story on war in Sudan, and I’ll show you 20 bloggers who think the real story is how the Times fails in its coverage of war in Sudan.

But the biggest evil of blogs is that first flaw, blogging’s original sin: the discounting of news-gathering in favor of news analysis. Bloggers are forever telling us how easy journalism is, yet very few of them have ever really practiced it. Sure, they may have written opinion pieces that compare favorably to the work of Molly Ivins or Ann Coulter, but opinion writing is a tiny - and let’s be honest, inconsequential - corner of the journalism world. Real journalism - the practice of adding to the store of public knowledge by reporting news - is a difficult, thankless, and often unpleasant task. Bloggers want no part of it. Everyone wants E.J. Dionne’s job; no one wants to be Michael Dobbs.

There are other substantive critiques of the blogosphere. Writing for the Financial Times, Trevor Butterworth notes (http://go.philly.com/

butterworth) that the “dismal fate of blogging” is that “it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence.”

Andrew Keen (http://go.philly.com/keen) worries that the outbreak of blogs has turned us into a world where everyone writes and no one reads: “Without an elite mainstream media, we will lose our memory for things learnt, read, experienced, or heard.”

Another worry is that, as a medium, the blog does not value well-crafted writing. Except for Mark Steyn and James Lileks, it’s hard to pick out even three beautiful writers from the millions of bloggers.

Again, the fault here lies with the medium: Being a good writer helps a blogger about as much as a good singing voice helps a broadcast anchor.

Ah well.  Mind you, Hugh Hewitt sings the other side of the record. Hewitt does talk radio for a religious network.

In the last half-dozen years, a huge portion of that text was made available exclusively over the Internet, much of it via the online editions of newspapers, but far more via the more than 25 million blogs that have sprung up since 1999.

Each morning, we awake to new mountains of information. Bloggers are the new Sherpas, leading their readers through those various ranges. Newspaper reporters and editors are the old Sherpas. Lots of folks - especially liberals and elites - still like the old Sherpas. The mainstream media - MSM - are populated overwhelmingly by left- and hard-left-leaning writers and editors, and few people even bother to argue the point anymore. American newspapers are not unlike American car companies: Market dominance made them lazy and uninterested in their customer base, and a lot of that base slowly melted away, even before the new media arrived. When blogs and talk radio and cable arrived and offered a choice to news consumers long disgusted with biased product, remaining center-right readers began to bolt.

And nonideological readers, too, began to drift away. Internet news and opinion providers are by and large free. Let’s say I love Cleveland-area sports and live in Southern California. I can get the Indians and Browns news from the online editions of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Akron Beacon Journal, the stuff the newspapers of Southern California never cover. Why bother even touching, say, the Los Angeles Times, when I can read the Washington Post for politics, the Wall Street Journal for business, Townhall.com and RealClearPolitics.com for opinion, and the Ohio newspapers for sports? The Times went hard-left years ago, with almost no center-right voice to balance its incessant cheerleading for Democrats. It left me; I didn’t leave it.

High expectations, polarization, political slant, vehemence - you’re going to get all that and bad writing too. Blogs are put up by people in all corners of the wired world. A few are wannabe journalists, most aren’t. People are left, right, conservative, liberal, indifferent or somewhere in the centre. The Last-Hewitt pieces aren’t blog posts, they are op-eds. Kind of hard to tell the difference sometimes, eh?

via: BuzzMachine