Dullard columnist Bullard dismisses citizen journalism

We can add Sunday Times columnist David Bullard to the list of mainstream media people who are whistling through the graveyard as their industry bankrupts itself:

Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They’re cobbled together by people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.

It’s even sadder when someone reads them.

Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors. As with most things in life, something that costs nothing is usually worth nothing and that puzzles me. Are there really 70 million bloggers out there hoping that their writing talents will be recognised, or is this just another example of modern narcissism?

True, there are a lot of blogs that, well, suck. There are a lot of sucky newspapers, as well as not-so sucky newspapers have sucky, moronic columnists who actually have the gall to call for their governments to go after bloggers whose words that the columnist finds offensive., which is what Dullard Bullard does at the end of his little throwaway rant.

And for the blogs that DO suck … lets look at my own experience running The Blog Peoria Project. Out of the 357 blogs that have been created, I have just 41 that are still operating. A handful, maybe five or six, are essentially defunct with no new posts in many months and I can consider abandoned. That’s one out of ten. The rest were attempts at creating slpogs — spam blogs — that existed to create artificially high link courts to commercial sites. God knows how many sploggers tried to create sites here but failed because I limit registration to specific email domains. Of the 45 that remain, there are probably half that contain anything remotely an imitation to a newspaper column. Just this weekend, there was another report on MSNBC — a columnist, really — who attempted to judge all blogs by looking at the content of a handful of catblogs.

There’s a lot of MSMers who are going to great lengths to misrepresent the competition for peoples’ eyeballs.

So, am I just playing air guitar here? Maybe. But at least some members of the MSM find my guitar playing quite interesting, as I’m one of several who have been invited to contribute reports to WHOI, which apparently recognizes that if citizen journalists are talking about things that the MSM isn’t, then perhaps the MSM might be missing something.

UPDATE: Corrected an error, and noting that Online Media Cultlist has an interesting take on Bullard the Dullard:

While surely some blogs do fixate upon narcissistic minutiae, this ignores the teeming raft of writer/bloggers that inject serious news, personal takes, opinions, reviews, and interviews into the broader online conversation. It ignores the fact that the Blogosphere is increasingly the place where people turn for news, particularly in terms of breaking news events and stories that involve technology and the online world.

And I owe a belated hat tip to Blogger’s Blog:

Using miscellaneous personal blogs as a comparison tool between blogs and journalism really isn’t fair to blogs. There are a lot of excellent blogs that are well researched. Often these blogs are followed by good journalists covering a story and the blogs or bloggers are often quoted in news stories. The recent pet food recall problem was just one example where blogs/websites like PetConnection became a source for journalists covering a story.

And wasn’t it a blogger who writes about the minutiae of old typewriters and type styles who revealed that the Bush Air Force AWOL documents were latter-day forgeries? I believe we called that one “Rathergate.”