27 Sept 2007

The Industrial News Cycle v. Blogs

Three blokes at the ABC review the great GG-blog spat of July 2007. It's a lengthy piece which attempts to tiptoe delicately through the minefield of Australia's left-right "culture wars", offering a few gentle criticisms of bloggers and MSM alike. For example:
The Australian's decision to "go" the bloggers ... perhaps shows how much some writers at the paper have riding on an unlikely Coalition victory.
Bravo. That should merit an outraged response from Sham-I-am & Co tomorrow!

But the review offers little of substance and ends up sounding like an advert for these three blokes' own "ARC-funded" [sic] work:
Our project, at least, is about giving national issues a local relevance, and aggregating local stories for a new kind of coverage that is different from the increasingly "presidential" narratives of the MSM.

Newspaper editors, we feel, should be studying experiments like this sympathetically, and with an eye to the future, and looking to the blogosphere for the next generation of knowledgeable, clever, engaged political commentators.
There were at least two copy errors in the piece - maybe the boys are just trying to establish their blogging creds? Well, good luck to them.