We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together
Ed Murray voices my feeling about the latest NY Times lameness about blogging - as noted by Fishrush.
Doc nails the generating principle of this sort of story: 1. slow news day; 2. topic must be, uh, timely, in the print media sense of that, 3. blurry, uninterrogated notion of some sort of conflict going on.
The only thing I'd add is, one of the thrusts of blogging is the lively interaction of individuals speaking for themselves. Now, to take this kind of complex interaction, which operates on a small scale in fast time and generates splendid micro-exchanges like that currently unfolding between Wonderchicken and AKMA (and now Ward) - and to choose to see as ''the story'' some large-scale "rift" between two large abstract entities (''warbloggers'' or whatever) - is to impose from another world the very sort of simplifying taxonomy that blogging deconstructs. It is misreading so fundamental as to misrepresent only everything going on with the phenomenon.
Granted, there are bloggers, mostly from mainstream media, who have declined to do more than alliteratively transfer their professional proclivities for abstract, aligned pugnacious punditry to pixels. But for the Times to see that and nothing else is intellectually lazy, journalistically irresponsible, and pragmatically useless. Other than that it's journalism at its best.
One of the problems for Big Media is that the micro-level interactions, relations, exchanges of the blogosphere move too quickly to be tracked. By the time your ''think piece'' makes it into print, the thing it is about has changed. Thus the impetus to create larger, slower, more stable structures that can be moved around a fictive battleground by the journalist with the help of adjutant pundits.
The only reason to even bother saying this is that this particular story is so patently off base as to suggest a rough indicator of the degree to which other trendy journalistic summaries of reality - about which we have less direct awareness - might err:
...Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless
