Newspapers vs. weblogs: Some discussions are not as useful as others

Posted by Philip Barron at 11:23 AM on March 26, 2007.

Writing at my own weblog a few days ago, I was struck by a decidedly reactionary guest commentary on blogs published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

I don't understand why we celebrate the growth of blogs. It seems to me that they are just another expression of our fascination with our own opinions. We are fast becoming a nation of Sayers, rather than Doers.

For all the hype about interactivity, blogs are first and foremost the epitome of one-way chatter. You can sit at your computer and spew a stream of consciousness. You can chuckle at your own funny lines, pat yourself on the back for a pithy comment, stand up and shake your fist while driving your point home.

I have what I hope is a helpful suggestion for bloggers: Instead of just sitting inside your house and commenting on the world around you, why don't you, um, get up and leave? There is a whole non-cyber, non-virtual place waiting for you and your opinions. It's called the world.

I snarked at the time that a pro-blogging piece in that paper would be an unlikely occurence, but mirabile dictu, the P-D offered one up, courtesy of another guest:

My problem with Anderson's argument is two-fold. First, his tone is that of the village scold, berating his fellow citizens for not doing more and for wasting their time on the Internet posting their opinions. Given that a majority of bloggers are under 30, is he saying that teenagers and young adults waste a lot of time, or is he singling out bloggers generally for scorn?

Casting stones at one form of leisure activity is dubious at best, and it's worth noting that today's youth devote a greater percentage of their time to volunteer work than any other generation.

More importantly, though, the proliferation of Internet blogs is a sign of a healthy populace involved in an almost limitless range of political and commercial discussions.

Kudos to Jim Durbin, a business blogging expert, for delivering a much-deserved knockdown to the original commenter's argument; the sad thing is that such a response was necessary in the pages of a major newspaper as, reputedly, the Post-Dispatch. Word arrives slowly to we of the heartland, but it's rumored that some newspapers have acknowledged the public interest in and potential of blogging as established fact. You're not likely to read many antiquated "blogging is bad!" commentaries in such papers - guest-written or not - because those papers understand that the story has long since moved on.

Guest commentaries on the relative merits of VHS and Betamax would have been just as timely an exchange as the blogging pieces in the Post-Dispatch.

Some might argue that a newspaper with its own in-house blogging effort, such as the P-D, actually does "get" the significance of blogging. Those folks are invited to compare the Post-Dispatch with some other papers engaged with blogging.

To paraphrase a now-departed secretary of defense, you apprehend the world with the newspaper you have. For the readers of the P-D, that world is a sleepy, slow-moving place indeed.

Tagged as: newspapers, bloggers, weblogs

Philip Barron is a St. Louis writer and author of the blog Waveflux.