Thursday, December 21, 2006

Bottom story of the day

I love Best of from WSJ normally, but this story is abit much:

Pavlov's Blog
If you ever want an illustration of the psychological phenomenon known as conditioned reflex, write a disdainful article about blogs and get it into print. Our talented young colleague Joe Rago did just that yesterday, and, predictably enough, he was met with howls of outrage from the herd of iconoclasts collectively known as the blogosphere.

We need to clarify one thing, though. Chris Muir's Day by Day cartoon yesterday was devoted to faulting Rago's piece for about the most trivial error imaginable: a missing period at the end of a paragraph. Once that mistake was corrected online, Muir updated his cartoon (quoting verbatim): "Note: WSJ editurz have korrected punshuation punctuashion the period thing 10amEST.-Ed." Blogger Glenn Reynolds sneered, "I notice that Rago has fixed the typo, . . . after just a few hours, a speed that is only a bit slower than the average blogger."

Actually, it was your humble columnist (who also serves as editor of this Web site) who fixed this typo. What's more, we went back and checked, and it turns out that we, not Rago, were responsible for the typo in the first place. The period was there in the print edition, and apparently we deleted it through an errant keystroke while we were preparing the article for online posting.

You can still blame the MSM, though. After all, even though what we do has some resemblance to blogging, we are part of the mighty Wall Street Journal. (link)

A part of the 'MSM' taking up for a fellow journalist? Notice the reporting of the 'sneer' by Glenn Reynolds (InstaPundit). How does Taranto know that Glenn was sneering? I didn't see anything in the link (although he probably was, you know how wild Glenn is). I read quite abit about Rago's comments on many blogs (and read Rago's column myself). Not too many posts I saw were not warranted by Rago's (and by extension now Taranto's) holier-than-thou attitude concerning 'journalists' vs. bloggers.

After what I've seen lately, I'll take the bloggers (en masse) over the journalists. Of course, no one blogger (or even small group) can compete with the MSM, but on the whole, with the instant checks and balances that the blogosphere has any and all errors are instantly leapt on. In the MSM world, errors are caught but the care doesn't seem to be there.

And really, how many didn't think the day by day cartoon was funny? hehTM
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Reason not to be a journalist?

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