Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Blog-Culture Changes: Paul Krugman launches one...

...titled The Conscience of a Liberal, and the Times axes Times Select (which some thought was a crappy idea in the first place) ....

but I wonder if this means the Times will get more "bloggy"--which may not be a great strategy. Blogs may be fine tools for quick, on the fly publishing, as well as for publishing personal opinions, but blogs are more than tools....

When I spoke to a couple of journalism classes at the University of North Carolina, I realized how much blogs are more than just tools and to say they are "just tools" diminishes their cultural significance and impact. There is a whole culture out here, a community, that's grown in many different ways--and now has many more branches than folks like Rebecca Blood, who wrote "The Weblog Handbook" in 2002, could see at that time.

Blood's book, now, should be recommended reading to *any* journalism class that desires to understand blogging. You can't quite understand what's going on now if you don't understand the milieu in which blogs developed...

and what's happened out here that would compel someone like Paul Krugman to jump into the medium (although I did find he did not respond to his comments--then again, neither do many "newbie" bloggers. That's something you learn in time.)

I would, though, hate to see the Times become one giant blog network. That would, IMO, simply look like an attempt to subsume another form of media that should remain separate--not just because it gives "The People" voice, but because it has its own culture and thus its own signficance...

and, may I say, it's own history...

Think about it...

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