Lemon: War Between MSM and Blogs

Today Unambig Ambi linked to a piece in the Globe by Christie Blatchford.
This afternoon, Phantom Observer posted on Kady O'Malley's rant against our media.
A YEAR AND A HALF AGO - we wrote a piece on the supposed Death of the Blog.
Now Blatch is in the top .0001 percent of all columnists in Canada. Love everything she does and if she did it on a blog I'd put a link at the top of my sidebar.
Andrew Coyne is also in this .0001 percent group and he embraces blogs. Even honours CBL with a link. I owe him a link and will get around to it when I run into him again and let him buy me that beer he promised.
It's interesting that Kady should be so virulently negative about blogs when she is appointed to comment on them for Newman.

But where the two distaff writers noted above fail is that they are narrowed in their mutual focus as if comparing the pony express to email. Their perspectives are akin to comparing buggy whips to accelerators on Ferraris. They are comparing apples to bicycles.

Blogs are extensions of the traditional media that Blatch and Kady work for. Blogs are, collectively, McLuhan's "Global Electronic Consciousness". Everyone's point of view, expressed everywhere, all the time. Some valid, some not. Some partisan, very few not. Very few not making their partisanship known; whether their partisanship is for fluffy bunnies, or against pit bulls, or Democratic or Republican. This a difference from MSM which usually represents itself as neutral.

I can understand their points of view, because these are a factor of their perspective. They live and die career-wise on the basis of thousands of people buying newspapers and magazines. Just as blacksmiths depended on people using horses to plough.

Print media is in its darkest days. As I posted a few months ago, on a dark day when the New York Times had 1.1 million readers, there were 19 million blog posts on Virginia Tech. Hundreds of these posts were from the scene in real time. From places to which MSM reporters didn't have access. Like blogs now published in Iraq.

Traditional media will have a role until the Baby Boomers meet their final cosmic conclusion. Then, blogs in all their form, all the time.