Some Things Stay the Same

While I've been away from the water cooler, the blogosphere has churned away without me. In reading various blogs, one of the ironic comments I keep coming back to is Nigel Swaby's claim that "No wonder bloggers never get taken seriously."

For someone who has repeatedly shelled out cold hard cash for paid press releases of his own myriad blogs, I find this statement highly amusing on its surface.

But in the nanosecond that follows, I can't help but think about how this is just yet another completely asinine extrapolation from the king of bullshit.

Note to Nigel Swaby, blogger extraordinnaire: Rule number one of blogging is that if you don't have anything to say, don't. If this is your ultimate wisdom on the blog format, why spend such a great deal of time registering dozens of free Blogger blogs?

(On that note, rule number two of blogging is that it's stupidly unprofessional to run a lead-generating enterprise from a freebie wysiwyg blog. But I digress...)

Obviously Nigel Swaby is so out of touch with media, technology, and well, reality, that it has escaped him that bloggers comprise a significant portion of information streams.

Once again, let's have the smart kids go ahead and do all the heavy lifting. Here is a condensed list of blogs and bloggers that are regularly quoted, sourced, and in fact scoop mainstream media:

Left-wing politics, Daily Kos

Right-wing politics, Michelle Malkin

Libertarian politics, Reason

Celebrity nonsense, TMZ

Beltway nonsense, Wonkette

Marketing, Strumpette

Environment, Treehugger

Auto industry, GM Fastlane

(ahem) Real estate, Inman

Of course, this doesn't even begin to touch on the increasing number of traditional journalists who maintain blogs in order to stay relevant in a continually shifting information marketplace.

In fact, the topic of John Edwards' campaign blogger has garnered dozens of traditional media stories in and of itself.

John Schwartz of the New York Times admitted that traditional journos were outmatched by the blogosphere in their coverage of the 2004 tsunami, saying “For vivid reporting from the enormous zone of tsunami disaster, it was hard to beat the blogs.”

J-schools have echoed the same sentiment for years. "The question now isn’t whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn’t whether bloggers “are” journalists. They apparently are, sometimes. We have to ask different questions now because events have moved the story forward. By “events” I mean things on the surface we can see...and things underneath that we have yet to discern."

Meanwhile, Nigel Swaby says, "In real journalism, a juicy tidbit like this would be thoroughly vetted before ever having a bit of ink splashed on it."

Unfortunately, Nigel, a couple of glaring exceptions immediately come springing to mind. Remember a little thing called the 2000 Election? Or a high-profile journalist by the name of Jayson Blair?

I could go on, but really, why bother? Clearly, this is just yet another example of Nigel Swaby just not getting it. Even more, I don't think he could find "it" with both hands.

With that in mind, I'll leave it at this... unless you're a blogger trying to corner the market on "smug, half-baked kook," shop those thoughts around the wide world of webs in search of information that may confirm or deny your knee-jerk lunacy.

And if you can't do that, keep your hands off the keyboard.