JOSEPH RAGO “The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.”

The WSJ‘s op-ed column goes for blogs. Actually a chap called Joseph Rago, assistant editorial features editor of the WSJ goes for them. Well done young man! You’ve shot the elephant.

Here is the news. Blogs are blogs. Mine is written in scraps of the day, mainly to pass on interesting things that I like to anyone who cares to notice (Richard Jefferies, Francois Villon, Primo Levi, Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry etc.), but also to force me to react to the news cycle. If I want to write something more considered, there are books (with about the same number of readers), or I can just take more time to write what I post.

Blogs are mainstream media now. This blog certainly isn’t MSM, but in the UK a political blogger like Iain Dale gets over 6,000 hits a day – that adds up to a weekly circulation many trade magazines would be happy with.

There are three types of blog I value particularly:

• Commonplace book – e.g. Roy Greenslade. Aggregation and commentary via the MSM Guardian.
• Bulletin board – e.g. Brian Stelter, a college student running a message centre for a micro-community – in this case TV news people.
• Informed essayist – Jeff Matthews, a hedge fund manager who taps out wry essays from time to time.

Blogging at its best probably contains the same range of intellect, endeavour and human interest as Pascal’s Pensées or Pepys’ diary. It’s all there, the pearls waiting to be discovered in the online oyster fields.