//begin rant

There's been a lot of blog-bashing in the print media lately (the latest screed coming from the Boston Globe's Alex Beam. Ironically, blogs have probably been the main driver of web readers to his column on the web, and those web readers will undoubtedly outnumber the people who bother to take the time to read it in print, as they (unlike those of us who have weblogs) have a life.

Then there's the allegedly pro-blog propaganda , notably the opinion piece in the LA Times from a right-wing think-tanker, which will also be mostly read and linked to by bloggers…just like I am now.

I smell a media conspiracy.

Could all of this blog-bashing be an effort to raise the hit-count on electronic fishwrap sites, and consequently increase their advertising revenues?

Or is it more of a biological response to something that they just don't understand–interactive media?

I've been in a few newsrooms in the past few years, notably that of my hometown paper, the once-pround Baltimore Sun. They are a land of stovepipe, archaic technology, where until recently reporters and editors didn't have easy access to external e-mail on their desktops–they often had to rely on AOL accounts. In the past, if you wanted to write a letter in response to an article or opinion piece, you had to send snail mail to an editor, who would pare down your letter for publication at best, or (more likely) file-13 it. Now, any yahoo can, with a little effort and some social engineering, e-mail a letter straight to the reporter –and copy it to a few thousand close friends, post it on his weblog, and otherwise publicly excoriate the offending scribe.

Welcome to my world, newsprint jockeys.

Ever since I started working for trade rags in the early '90's, my e-mail address has been in the masthead of the publication I worked for, out there for anybody to add to their spam list. As a result, I have received countless chain e-mails, offers for breast augmentation, and other e-trash –so much at times that I have set my mail filters to delete anything from aol.com, yahoo.com or msn.com senders. But I have also received a pretty heavy dose of direct feedback from readers. I've also traded words with them on discussion boards, on Usenet, and on rare occasions via instant messages. And I've incorporated feedback into the next column on the subject.

Blogs take that kind of conversation a step further. You can't weigh the value of a blog by its individual hitrate–it's how it factors into the conversation mesh of “blogspace” and other online media that matters. And that's what really confounds the plate-printed media guys, BigCo or otherwise–they rarely get any kind of synergy going with anything, even when they try to intentionally.

The Sun recently inked a deal with a local TV station to have its reporters and talking heads appear on newscasts (and share advertising revenue)–and its well-known commentators have had gigs with other TV stations in Baltimore for some time. Does it up readership? Nope. Does it make their media more interactive? Nope.

Part of the problem at the Sun is the utterly stupid way it handled online media to begin with–in an effort to prevent the unionization of the webslingers, it purposely firewalled web operations from the rest of the news operation, so print reporters were contractually banned from doing web-exclusive follow-up stories or writing web-only content. Instead of using marquee names from the paper, the moronic management tried to hire freelancers at slave wages to write online entertainment, food and other feature content.

So when the ink-and-paper guys can't even get the web right (as Dave Winer has noted frequently regarding the San Jose Mercury), how can we expect them to understand blogs? It's not the same medium as print, and they don't get that. They're still trying to wrap their brains around that Marshall McLuhan stuff.

//end rant.

And while we're talking about Marshall McLuhan…

For those of you who are true McLuhan believers, blogs are about as cool a text-based medium as you can get, next to instant messaging. Or instant outlining, I suppose…

//begin rant

There's been a lot of blog-bashing in the print media lately (the latest screed coming from the Boston Globe's Alex Beam. Ironically, blogs have probably been the main driver of web readers to his column on the web, and those web readers will undoubtedly outnumber the people who bother to take the time to read it in print, as they (unlike those of us who have weblogs) have a life.

Then there's the allegedly pro-blog propaganda , notably the opinion piece in the LA Times from a right-wing think-tanker, which will also be mostly read and linked to by bloggers…just like I am now.

I smell a media conspiracy.

Could all of this blog-bashing be an effort to raise the hit-count on electronic fishwrap sites, and consequently increase their advertising revenues?

Or is it more of a biological response to something that they just don't understand–interactive media?

I've been in a few newsrooms in the past few years, notably that of my hometown paper, the once-pround Baltimore Sun. They are a land of stovepipe, archaic technology, where until recently reporters and editors didn't have easy access to external e-mail on their desktops–they often had to rely on AOL accounts. In the past, if you wanted to write a letter in response to an article or opinion piece, you had to send snail mail to an editor, who would pare down your letter for publication at best, or (more likely) file-13 it. Now, any yahoo can, with a little effort and some social engineering, e-mail a letter straight to the reporter –and copy it to a few thousand close friends, post it on his weblog, and otherwise publicly excoriate the offending scribe.

Welcome to my world, newsprint jockeys.

Ever since I started working for trade rags in the early '90's, my e-mail address has been in the masthead of the publication I worked for, out there for anybody to add to their spam list. As a result, I have received countless chain e-mails, offers for breast augmentation, and other e-trash –so much at times that I have set my mail filters to delete anything from aol.com, yahoo.com or msn.com senders. But I have also received a pretty heavy dose of direct feedback from readers. I've also traded words with them on discussion boards, on Usenet, and on rare occasions via instant messages. And I've incorporated feedback into the next column on the subject.

Blogs take that kind of conversation a step further. You can't weigh the value of a blog by its individual hitrate–it's how it factors into the conversation mesh of “blogspace” and other online media that matters. And that's what really confounds the plate-printed media guys, BigCo or otherwise–they rarely get any kind of synergy going with anything, even when they try to intentionally.

The Sun recently inked a deal with a local TV station to have its reporters and talking heads appear on newscasts (and share advertising revenue)–and its well-known commentators have had gigs with other TV stations in Baltimore for some time. Does it up readership? Nope. Does it make their media more interactive? Nope.

So when the ink-and-paper guys can't even get the web right (as Dave Winer has noted frequently regarding the San Jose Mercury), how can we expect them to understand blogs? It's not the same medium as print, and they don't get that. They're still trying to wrap their brains around that Marshall McLuhan stuff.

//end rant.

And while we're talking about Marshall McLuhan…

For those of you who are true McLuhan believers, blogs are about as cool a text-based medium as you can get, next to instant messaging. Or instant outlining, I suppose…