WSJ Takes Issue With Blogs

The mainstream media has been accused many times of either misunderstanding or fearing the blogosphere. Since the Wall Street Journal is as mainstream as the Mississippi River, a damning indictment of blogs should carry some weight. Unless you look at it a little more closely.

blog hit piece from October 2005. To wit, Rago casts this little Glenn Reynolds here. Rago does spank both sides of the political spectrum in his writing: Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions--John Kerry always providing useful material--while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq. Leftward fatuities too are easily found: The fatuity matters more than the politics. An aside about OpinionJournal: one of its main features is Mosaic theory (scroll down that page), the information that pops up in their Blackberries and Treos courtesy of the analyst may have originated on blogs. At the time, it appeared that the advice on Google's plans came from two places - Garett Rogers "Googling Google" website. Neither the music site nor the black box have debuted from Google. The Journal isn't above writing about bloggers and their work. They've done their share of covering blogs and related issues; one current story on their Technology pages describes changes at Google's Blogger service. It seems that when they write a story about Google, that story, and its embedded advertising, receives placement in the Journal's public section of its website, instead of going behind the subscription wall with the rest of its excellent content. That doesn't happen by accident. Now as far as the Journal goes, they aren't above indulging in some remora-like snackery either. You see, I've retained some emails from a while back that I exchanged with one of their Dow Jones Newswire stringers who had obviously lifted a quote by a tech company representative from a blog without attributing its placement. So please, Joseph Rago, leave the bloggers be until you've cleaned your newsroom first. But write some more delectable linkbait, because those are some really tasty scraps you've got going there. I can always use stuff like this. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark Murdok: David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.