LAT's Blog Story Ignores LA-Based LGF, Opens With Personal Journal Attracting 15 Hits Per Day

Cathy Seipp wonders if this is a guild protecting its own interests:

How obscure are the blogs discussed in Calendar Weekend? The story opened with one that gets just 15 daily visits, and closed with another that no longer exists. What kind of L.A. blogs did these upstage? Just as one example, Little Green Footballs, which played a major role exposing CBS' National Guard memos story as a hoax last year, gets at least 50,000 hits a day. A cynic might suspect that The Times tries to make blogs seem as boring and inconsequential as possible, in order to staunch the flow of readers and advertisers from newspapers to the Internet.

"Politics runs heavy too," staff writer Scott Martelle wrote, "with intense, phlegm-flecked rants…." That would be spittle, obviously, in such an instance, not phlegm, and thanks a lot for making me stop to consider the difference. Then there's his strange reporting and analysis. "Blogging has yet to break out of its relatively small corner of the Internet," he (mis)informs readers. "Only about 5% of all adults contribute to blogs."

I'd guess that also less than 5% appear on TV or write for magazines, so are these enterprises therefore minor corners of the media world?

Staff writers at The Times often turn in very little copy (one story a week is not atypical), which means some are getting paid around $2,000 per mediocre, grudging piece. Wouldn't it be better to spend that money on freelancers (or bloggers!) who, if they can't work themselves up into something worth reading, don't get paid? Let the heads roll, I say.

As Traffic Non-Santa might say: Heh and/or Indeed.

Meanwhile... Michelle Malkin is less than impressed with the NYT's Sunday piece on blogs. Same old same old -- we have "message discipline" (read: we're hacks without the capacity for original thought or self-scrutiny) and of course we have the famously conservative media in our pockets.

posted by Ace at 06:26 PM

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