He's got a gig at the WSJ

Joseph Rago is either a pompous ass or a naive innocent set up by James Taranto. His screed against blogs seems more like a parody of the typical MSM pundit than a serious essay.

He ends with this gem:

Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.

Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.

He seems not to have noticed the huge amount of decay in print these days. He doesn't seem to have read Michael Barone's blog, or Glenn Reynolds', or Ann Althouse's, or James Lileks or any of hundreds of others with just as excellent credentials as his own, and are more interesting, to boot. Only one of them I'd have ever heard of without the internet.

A more balanced, but still negative, piece is this one by Mayrav Saar about the attraction of speaking one's piece to the world.