When You Attack the Blogosphere, Please Turn On Your Brain First
The days when old guard traditional/print media journalists could get away with (fearing and therefore) ridiculing the vast wilds of the new media are mercifully near their end.
Therefore, it’s almost stunningly baffling that David Bullard, a columnist for South Africa’s Sunday Times, could so fundamentally misunderstand what’s going on in the blogosphere today. In a hateful, condescending piece called “Name and shame offensive bloggers,” Bullard equates bloggers as “the air guitars of journalism,” written by those “who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism.” Bullard fails to realize, of course, that many blogs are written by professional journalists and are published in online versions of mainstream media.
The biggest misconception comes when Bullard relates that all blogs focus upon the “tedious minutiae” of daily lives and muses that the growth of the blogosphere can be explained by “modern narcissism.”
While surely some blogs do fixate upon narcissistic minutiae, this ignores the teeming raft of writer/bloggers that inject serious news, personal takes, opinions, reviews, and interviews into the broader online conversation. It ignores the fact that the blogosphere is increasingly the place where people turn for news, particularly in terms of breaking news events and stories that involve technology and the online world.
The column turns nearly xenophobic at its end, referencing “some anonymous, scrofulous nerd pumping meaningless drivel into cyberspace at all hours of the day and night simply because he can’t get a girl to sleep with him.”
Vinny Lingham smartly notes that, “This is exactly the mentality that is leading to the decline of offline print as a source of information, because the people entrenched in the offline world are so resistant to change, they cannot keep up with the times.”
Bloggers Blog: “Using miscellaneous personal blogs as a comparison tool between blogs and journalism really isn’t fair to blogs.”
Vincent Maher says that David Bullard owes South Africans an apology for “a dazzling display of arrogance” and then goes on to break down (and crush) the column line by line.
Bullard’s column is called “Out to Lunch.” Indeed.
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May 7th, 2007 at 11:41 am
Fitting that his post shows up on Monday - sounds like he has a case of them…
May 7th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
[...] Reading: Vinny Lingham’s Blog, Online Media Cultist, Vincent Maher - Media In Transition, Bloggers [...]
May 7th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
[...] Corrected an error, and noting that Online Media Cultlist has an interesting take on Bullard the Dullard: While surely some blogs do fixate upon narcissistic [...]
May 7th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
[...] Eric Berlin calls Bullard’s column “a hateful, condescending piece” and suggests Bullard turn on his brain before attacking the blogosphere. [...]
May 7th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Jason/Webomatica - Can the entire column be blamed on a lack of TPS Report cover sheets?
May 7th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
When You Attack the Blogosphere, Please Turn On Your Brain First
The days when old guard traditional/print media journalists could get away with (fearing and therefore) ridiculing the vast wilds of the new media are mercifully near their end. Therefore, it’s almost stunningly baffling that David Bullard, a columni…
May 8th, 2007 at 12:29 am
Besides stating the obvious, that mainstream journalists are running scared of losing control of the conversation, two points:
1. Whether bloggers are trained journalists or not is mostly irrelevant. Readers are interested in their specialized knowledge (something journalists can’t begin to match), not their “bias-free” (as if) journalism.
2. The very fact that folks like Bullard and George Will are attacking bloggers so vehemently shows that they couldn’t possibly have probed very deep into the blogosphere. Anyone who has knows it’s a treasure trove of all kinds of specialized knowledge on everything from computer technology to travel tips. You just have to know how to find it.
These professional journalists may have plenty of fine sources in their Rolodex, but they don’t have a clue how to navigate in the blogosphere, where they’re obviously still rank amateurs.
That’s fine, but they should start out asking questions and trying to learn, rather than shooting with both barrels.
May 9th, 2007 at 5:00 am
Bullard’s publicity stunt worked really well. With all the traffic he’s bringing in to sundaytimes.co.za he’ll be able to ask for a raise soon.
May 16th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Great points Gordon, and the hilarious/interesting thing is that “professional journalists” are taking blogging seriously *and* blogging themselves in ever increasing numbers!
May 17th, 2007 at 8:50 am
So journalists can’t begin to match the “specialized knowledge” of bloggers?
Too true, assuming of course that you are referring to the intimate, in-depth, and seemingly infinite knowledge bloggers have of their own dreary little lives.
By definition, journalists are obliged to have a somewhat broader field of interest and knowledge, which is why you’ll find that many more people in the real world get their information from newspapers rather than blogs.
May 17th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
“seemingly infinite knowledge bloggers have of their own dreary little lives”
Hmm… I guess I’m just not doing this blogging thing right. Yesterday I read Jonathan Schwartz’s blog, for example, and I still don’t have any idea what he had for breakfast, what kind of pets he has, whether he hates his parents …
I did read some interesting things about the new UltraSparc chip, his view of Microsoft’s latest patent rumblings, and so on.
But I guess this argument against blogging is equivalent to the way history is taught nowadays. I mean, why read original sources when you can just get a watered-down, boring, third-hand account from some “professional” historian!
May 17th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
A lot of people still have the misconception that “blogging” always equates to personal journal entries with a heavy emphasis on naval gazing, what Mr. Snuggles the cat is up to on a lazy afternoon, and so on.
Blogging can be broadly defined as content organized into chronological order. Under that umbrella sits many millions of blogs today, covering a dazzling array of subjects.
Are some blogs dreary, boring, and intolerable? Absolutely. But there’s also lots of good stuff, and painting all of them together with one broad brush is indicative of not really knowing what’s going on in the blogosphere.
May 17th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Personally, I think the “chronological order” feature of blogging is somewhat over-valued. I think of blogging more as “instant publishing”, or really near-instant publishing, for specialized content worth reading.
The stream-of-consciousness navel-gazing that so many journalists equate to blogging is a common sub-genre, but not the most interesting part for most folks above 20 or so.
There’s a second aspect of blogging that’s becoming increasingly important, and whose application separates specialized knowledge vs. navel-gazing. That’s treating a blog as a content management system. Categories and now tags and various search technologies are making this a useful reality.
June 17th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Ha-ha! Kudos.
You might be interested in reading –and commenting– this article:
http://www.thelunchbox-online.com/index/content/view/102/2/
What does South Africa and Southeast Asia have in common?
We’re still very much living in a pseudo-monarchy system; and bias are EXACTLY the values and coordinates used in our grid.
Maybe that Bullard guy never thought that blogosphere is anywhere further than the nearest hotdog stand.
July 14th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
[...] When You Attack the Blogosphere, Please Turn On Your Brain First by Eric Berlin [...]
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