Monday, March 07, 2005
SPECTOR ON BLOGGING
In his Globe and Mail column, Norman Spector today writes, "Canadian Bloggers have no one but themselves to blame."
I was unaware that Canadian bloggers were blaming themselves for anything or were in turn being blamed by someone else for something. After reading Spector's column I was going to make this post nothing more than a question: What is Norman's point here? Because as far as I can tell he fails to make any concerted coherent argument.
I found, however, that over at the e-group blog, quite a discussion is going on about Spector's piece. The consensus seems to be that no one is quite clear what Spector's point was. Spector himslef entered the discussion briefly to provide this cryptic answer to everyone's question:
Canadian bloggers have no one but themselves to blame for their achievements to date and, more important, for what they will achieve in future.Uh... thanks for that.
What I think that Spector's column does do is support a point made recently by Matt Yglesias (and I'm sure many others). Yglesias' argument, which I believe is a good one, was that blogging will not destroy MSM journalism; bloggers rely far too much on professional journalistic content for that to ever happen. What blogging does threaten is the MSM punditry. Spector's piece today exhibits that the writing of many professional columnists is often little better than what can be read on many blogs.
Read or Post a Comment
Well, down in the US, the bloggers are doing the investigative journalism in this Gannon/Guckert saga. Blogs at the very least represent amateur journalism. They are amateur in the sense that there are low barriers to entry into the market of ideas. The blogosphere has many public good characteristics, and for-profit business is threatened. Perfect competition implies zero average profit, which nobody in the "business" of journalism wants.
Matthew;
Whew! I thought it was just me, or the fact that I need glasses that made this hard to read!
Then I ran a couple tests. The Flesch Reading Ease score for this article is 35.6 on a 100-point scale, where prose that is easier to read scores higher, and 65 is considered the target for plain English.
It scored 12.2 on the Flesch-Kincaid index, which represents the combined years of education required to comprehend it. A typical target for easy comprehension is 7 to 8.
The scores for this post are 67.1 and 7.3, respectively.
BTW, for your original post - 63.3 and 8.6