Hi, I'm interested in your opinion on blogs. I think you may be on the mark for it not being a replacement for serious journalism but a little off the mark as to their overall worth.

I'm a technical person that works with computers so I'm more susceptible to an online medium but that's only because of how terrible newspapers have been at covering the topics that interest me. The newspaper cannot and will not discuss issues I care about at the level I wish to read them. In technical matters not only do they dumb things down beyond the point of (my) interest, they are often completely wrong. Sometimes this is a result of the difficulty of explaining technical concepts to a non-technical audience but fairly often it's factually incorrect. I've had to explain to friends and family members many times that the technical article they read in the newspaper was just plain wrong. If they're getting what I know about wrong, how can I trust them with what I don't know about?

And that's why I prefer blogs. The majority of blogs are just an exercise in writing for the person that writes it but there are many blogs written by the foremost experts in a vast number of narrow domains. This makes the information written in them incredibly useful and often very insightful. Newspapers generally cover their "bread and butter" topics such as politics and daily events better than blogs but there's no way for them to compete in the extremely long tail of interesting topics that are outside their regular domain. There's no way newspapers can compete with Bruce Schneier on information security or with Seth Godin on marketing since the scope of their discussion is too narrow and therefore not of general interest (but still of excellent quality).

It's also an issue of trust. I'd like you to read this

(A blog, I know but very much on topic for this discussion.)

Eventually he concludes:

But do you see the irony here? The study making this claim was constructed and published in a way that resists all efforts to evaluate its relevance, accuracy, or authority. Which hardly matters, since none of the reporting about the study seems to have made any such effort.

Pioneering research shows 'Google Generation' is a myth? So far as I can see, that report says more about the researchers who wrote it, and about the reporters who reacted to it, than it says about any real or imaginary trends.

I think this comes about because they've never had anyone check up on them before. The difference between the pain barrier of reading a newspaper article, then heading to the library to check the claims and vague references (which would have been necessary just 15 years ago) and reading an article online and doing a google search to get more information from many more sources is massive. Articles like those are why more and more of the younger generation are being turned off of traditional media.

By the way, to disclose my bias, the reason I was listening to your show this evening was because Larry O'Brien (the Hawaiian Larry) wrote about it on his blog. [Ed. I actually learned about it via twitter but it was written on the blog too]

Thanks for your time,

Guillaume Theoret