Journo against the blogs

Down in London for the day yesterday, WotN brought back this little item (from the Evening Standard but not online) by Andrew Gilligan:

This will be a blow to various Great Bores of Our Time, but I'm quite sure that 2006 is not, as predicted, going to be the "year of the blog". Oh, they've got their uses – especially in places such as Iran or the US Army, where professional reporters cannot easily go. But the idea that web-based diaries will overrun hated traditional tree-based newspapers can be dispelled by actually looking at a few of the things.

For one thing, many seem rather heavily dependent on the aforesaid hated traditional tree-based etcetera, being little more than overheated media commentary. For another, many are frankly rubbish – vanity publishing for obsessives, internecine arguers, the same kind of people who used to write for "Socialist Challenge" when I was a student.

And for a third, nobody reads them. Samizdata, described as "by some measures the nation's most successful independent blog", claims 15,000 visitors a day. Slightly less, in other words, than the circulation of the Lowestoft Journal.

What a brilliant piece of argument. Who, exactly, thinks blogs will overrun the tree-based media or is unaware of the dependence of blogs on these media for much of their material? And though there is indeed much rubbish to be found on blogs, so is there in newspapers. And 'nobody reads them'? Well, people do. Some blogs more, it is true, and others less, but this is how the world is. An interesting figure would be that for the blog-reading public overall. So, 'great bore of our time' and 'rubbish' seem, in the present case, entirely apt.