There's a reason we call them 'dinosaurs'

Virginia Postrel explains blogs in Forbes Magazine:

Something about blogs makes a lot of respectable journalists hyperventilate. News pros seem terribly threatened by online amateurs.. . .

Generalizing about blogs is like generalizing about books. A blog is simply a Web page whose author adds new content, or posts, over time. Blogging is a format, not a genre.

She's reviewing a typical denunciation of blogging by David Shaw in the Los Angeles Times. Why does every stuffed shirt in the One-way Media have to take a crack at bloggers? They always end up revealing their own bias, ignorance and arrogance. The fact that Shaw won a Pulitzer Prize only makes his errors more egregious. His journalistic bias is clear from his presumption that all bloggers have the same point of view. He is, of course, criticizing bloggers who have received the most attention lately for pointing out the phoniness of documents presented by CBS News as proof that George Bush was derelict in his National Guard service in the 1970s.

It's true that bloggers aren't journalists, but what does that have to do with the validity of their opinions and analysis? As Postrel writes, "Newspaper-based critics like Shaw have a desiccated notion of their own profession." They have forgotten that their jobs aren't government sinecures, that they serve markets and that markets are multilateral, if you don't have feedback and respond correctly you'll lose customers as fast as the LA Times. Postrel sums it up: "In the intense competition for attention, bloggers have found new ways to give readers value. Journalists should be asking not what we can teach them but what they can teach us."