More on Blood and Blogs

Prompted by Gwynneth Peaty's Discussion Board questions, I think Blood's ideas are standing up pretty well in 2009, with at least a small fraction of bloggers doing high quality work and being taken quite seriously. Professional journalists must be feeling threatened by the strengthening competition from the WWW, mostly in blogs. It's notable that mainstream media are making increasing use of blogs themselves, probably to try to claw back market share appeal to a younger audience.

I'm older than most, and still enjoy reading the newspapers. But the page I've always liked the best is that of "Letters to the Editor", because that's where the public had a slight but very limited ability, highly moderated at that, to (a) comment on the news, but more tellingly, to (b) comment on journalists' treatment of the news. Blogs have freed up the citizen journalists from the agenda and bias of that editor and his or her publication.