Comparing Blogging to Journalism Fairly

Just a quick note; if you want to compare bloggers to journalism fairly, you must measure the best of the bloggers against the best of formal journalism.

Because if you insist on defining blogging as "millions of people doodling in their journals, with rare people who sometimes make an interesting point", then I'm going to define journalism as "hundreds of thousands of parochial local rags designed to get as many local names as possible in print, and the rare international journalist that has something moderately interesting to say".

The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the handful of other Papers of Record are dwarfed by the sheer quantity of verbiage produced daily by village newspaper columnists 'wasting' their journalism degree's Instant Prestige^TM on how that pothole downtown really needs to be fixed, now that Aunt Millie's car was damaged.

Just as journalism has a mechanism for telling who are the best journalists, namely "they have jobs with one of the Big Names", weblogs also have a mechanism, traffic. If you want to compare Pulitzer Prize journalism to some schmoe on LiveJournal, don't bitch when I choose a cliche-ridden sports story as indicative of Jouralism as a whole.

Bad form, I say.