Blogs: Good or Evil?

"Do we need newspapers? No. Do we need news and journalism and an informed democracy? Of course we do. But paper? Why? Too often, I hear editors pleading to save newspapers and newsrooms as their status quo is threatened by plummeting circulation, imploding advertising, impatient shareholders, multimedia youth and the Internet. Everyone is to blame for newspapers' pickle, it seems, but the newspapers themselves.

"Yet perhaps the era of newspapers as we now know them is simply over. Especially since broadcast killed competitive newspapers, they have become one-size-fits-all vehicles that cannot possibly be all things to all people; they may be convenient, but they are also inefficient and shallow compared with the depth of the Internet. Newspapers are inevitably stale next to broadcast and online. They are inefficient advertising vehicles for highly targeted sales - classifieds and very local retail. Newspapers are terribly expensive to produce and distribute in a marketplace where your competition is free."

The NYT catches up with my reporting on the LAT suspending the blog of columnist Michael Hiltzik:

"In the last few years, newspapers around the country have been testing the waters of the seldom-restrained, often scrappy world of Web-based journalism by setting their reporters loose to write their own blogs.

"Last week, the experiment backfired for The Los Angeles Times. The newspaper suspended the blog of one of its columnists after it was revealed that he had posted comments on the paper's Web site and elsewhere on the Web under false names."

Jarvis on his Buzz Machine site, rips that lead:

"Well, that's like saying that The New York Times' experiment in journalism backfired with Jayson Blair. This isn't about blogging as a form. This is about journalists being afraid to deal with people, eye-to-eye."

Scott Collins of the LAT beats up on CBS's blog for not covering more intensively, say, the controversy surrounding the hiring of Katie Couric:

"CBS hype to the contrary, Public Eye is about as transparent as a sandbag. It better resembles an arm of the network's public relations department than a truth-telling proxy for millions of viewers."

I disagree. I think Public Eye, while not an ombudman's blog, has done a decent job of raising questions about CBS and other news organizations.

In Slate, Sarah Hepola says she's pulling the plug on her blog:

"One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I'd been reading, and shut down my blog. I had kept the blog for nearly five years, using it as a repository for personal anecdotes, travelogues, and the occasional flight of fiction -- all of which I hoped, eventually, might lead to a novel. And then, somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn't helping me write; it was keeping me from it.