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You use your judgment, you choose what you believe. Reading blogs is no different than reading OpEd anywhere.
I think she wants to be honored somehow as someone who got a job in an industry, rather than someone who presents their opinion without a byline and a photo in a newspaper. But there are tons of idiot hacks working in mainstream journalism, too.:)
It's only an honour if you have honour.
"The thing that I know, as all the editors I have had also know, is what I didn't get to confide or write or commit to paper, because someone else had the good sense to put on the brakes."
It is unfortunate that her "brakes" didn't get to her before this post. History will judge this as one of her worst pieces ever.
George
Hopefully she'll realize that people aren't interested or in awe of monologues anymore--often I have something to add to stories that interest me, and I'm interested in seeing how other people react to the story as well.
For example, the average teenager has ALWAYS known or cared very little about domestic politics, world affairs, economics, and so on. The difference now is that this information, though it may be surrounded by a lot of mindless drivel about gossip and celebrities, is actually accessible.
Blogs give a voice to idiots, but their proliferation means that it's virtually impossible for any piece of fact-based news to escape being reported upon.
I suspect the reality of the "curmudgeon" ("curmudgeoness"?) persona has more to do with the radical shift in the economics of producing and monetizing content. That is to say, it has more to do with initiative and focus than being within the safe walls of the establishment.
A columnist dealing in human experiences and emotions is not going to get very far playing to that audience. They wouldn't understand it anyway.
Her point is that blogs, in encouraging and rewarding a near-constant stream of new material, set up a situation where it is all but impossible to consistently ensure quality journalism. Consistently good journalism requires time. Time to do the research, time to talk to the people involved and, most importantly of all, time to write. Blogging, with its emphasis on post now, ask questions later, all but precludes this. Moreover, the increasing pressure newspapers put on their reporters to churn out content is turning them from journalists into bloggers and from producers of quality writing to producers of poorly written drivel.
While I think you do correctly identify the second strand of her argument (the democratisation of journalism is bad), with all due respect, I think your counter-argument is a little weak. First, if you're looking for someone let me be the person to say that journalism is not supposed to be a conversation. Just because a technology has come along and created a related field doesn't mean the related fields are equivalent. Journalists may now be bloggers but that doesn't mean that bloggers are journalists.
Second, that we now have the ability to have a two-way dialogue is great and I'm all for celebrating that but let's call a spade a spade. A two-way dialogue? That's a conversation. It's people putting forth different points of view and modifying their position (or not) based on what the other person says. Journalism is the act of investigating a story (often one that's topical), doing the research, and writing it up in a way that informs the reader. Does that make journalism and the Internet mutually exclusive? No, of course not. What it means is that you can't just call any form of writing about current events journalism.
On that note, I just wanted to add one thing. What I love about the online version of papers like the Globe is the ability for readers to comment on a specific article. That's the messy part of all this - it's both journalism and blogging mashed up together, and I think it's the best part of the online edition. I don't ever see people talking about this, and whenever I cite something from the Globe in my blog, I almost always talk about the comments as they provide a real barometer of the article's value that you just can't get in the print edition.
I don't always read the comments either. But sometimes I do, when I disagree or when I want to dig deeper into a story.
But, more importantly, *you* read your comments. Even if the majority of readers don't participate in the comments thread, the fact that you as the writer engage in discussion benefits your future posts! Even the readers who never read the comments will benefit from them as they help you fine tune your points and alert you to new stories and perspectives.
I understand that in the past, we took pains to avoid the sorts of conflicts that are occurring today. We didn't allow such consolidated ownership of media, media outlets wanted to be seen to be operating their news departments at arms length, etc. Why did all that change?