'Bloggers' emerge from internet underground

Canada's National Post joins the media parade in writing about blogging. The article has this stupid statement in it,

"As it stands, it's doubtful that personal blogs will supplant newspapers anytime soon. "There could be no blogs without full-time reporters collecting news and full-time editors putting out papers," Layne said."One valid criticism of bloggers is that they sometimes just link back and forth to each other. Remove the actual journalism from the Web and you've got a couple of hundred thousand people talking about nothing."

No kidding, if you got rid of journalists covering news you would also have a lot of TV anchors, radio personalities, late night TV hosts, all talking about nothing. Believe it or not, many bloggers have opinions of their own too.

It does follow up with this, "Furthermore, Layne hopes more newspaper columnists might learn something from bloggers' attitudes. "U.S. papers are so damned dry," he said. "I mean, who picks up the paper and says, 'I wonder what the Pentagon reporter has to say this morning.' The good bloggers are not much different from old-time newspaper columnists. They have a style, they have a personal connection with readers, they don't seem like factory-made op-ed writers. Maybe newspapers will inject some of this first- person style into the news columns. What I hope news sites learn from blogs is that personality matters."

Personality and voice do matter and that is what so many media outlets don't understand. Blogs have real people behind them with real opinions. The most widely read part of any paper is the editorials and the letters to the editor. It is amazing that it took years for journalists to learn that objective journalism has its place but it is the opinions that draw us back.