Fool to Imbeciles: Get a Life

I sometimes have to look hard for something on the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page with which I disagree.

Sometimes, it's easy. Assistant Features Editor Joseph Rago lets loose at bloggers today.

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

And those would be the nice bits.

Blogs are a long-tail phenomenon, and Rago misses it. There are n million blogs out there and n - 0.05 are bad. Finding a circle of interesting blogs widens your worldview considerably.

I read Rago's employer's page second thing every day, subscribe to four print magazines and a couple digital-only. I agree that blogs should respect the foundation and infrastructure that the MSM provides. Yet I cannot imagine a day without hitting at least half of the blogroll.

Rago will be vilified by the blogosphere for this. I mentioned I read the WSJ second thing every day. First is DayByDay, and today Chris takes a whack at Rago.

Media and Blogging Posted by jk at December 20, 2006 10:56 AM