I am Blogger, hear me roar

Babble on.

After reading Jack Kapica's piece on blogging in today's Globe and Mail, I am revelling in my vast, far-reaching influence as a blogger.  Of course, the power sure doesn't come with many perqs.  Maybe I'm feeling more like the Genie in Aladdin: "Phenomenal, cosmic, powers! Ittie-bittie, living space."  But I digress.

The problem with Jack's article...how can I put this delicately...is that Jack doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

"...what is evident is that bloggers are really fulfilling a reporting function. They are like emissaries of their communities, whose views they represent at a major political event, and who make sure that the folks back home get the kind of information that matters to them."

Oh, that's right.  I read Lileks for the local angle.  Damian Penny only appeals to the "folks back home" in Cornerbrook.  Bob at Let It Bleed, Anthony at The Meatriarchy, Nicholas at Ghost of a Flea - these guys are just small-town correspondents.

Or perhaps - and stay with me here, because this idea is WAY OUT THERE - the blogging paradigm is so vastly removed from Jack's myopic journalistic worldview that he may as well be smoking crack for all his views are worth on the topic.  Perhaps.

I couldn't give a rat's hindquarters where the people who post at The Shotgun are from.  I read them because they make sense.  I read them because they say what I'm thinking before I clean up my language.  I read them because they skip right by "well, that's certainly an interesting opinion" and go right to "you are obviously depriving a village somewhere of a perfectly serviceable idiot."  I read them because you can't find this stuff in the mainstream press.

Local?  The internet?  Are the Globe editors so technologically Amish that nobody in a story meeting would be able to call 'bullshit' when they read this?

Yet another strike against a newspaper that's already behind in the count.

Oh, and what's the deal with whaling away on Conrad Black?  I'm sure the guy doesn't even know what a blog is.  Yet somehow Count Crossharbour gets pummelled from the first paragraph to the last.  I'm guessing this is just Globe editorial policy now: "Today, the Canadian government signed a far-reaching trade treaty with the European Union.  And in related news, official sources say that Conrad Black is a complete asshole, and we all hate him very much."

Babble off.