Leah McLaren, you're wrong from Planck's Constant

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The Globe and Mail - Logging out of the blogosphere, Excerpt:

The day I decided to swear off the blogosphere was the morning I decided to plug my own name -- and the names of several other writers I know and admire -- into the search engine at technorati.com, a site known as Blogger HQ (it claims to itemize every new blog on the Internet; last time I checked, the head count was more than 28 million). The results of my search were grim: countless chat rooms full of bitter unpublished writers venomously slagging published ones -- their terrible spelling, poorly constructed sentences and outrageous amounts of displaced hatred and envy a testimony to why they became bloggers in the first place.
[...]
My own problem with the blogosphere is not that it's selling out to the mainstream, but that most of it is spectacularly boring.

I have to agree that if there are tens of millions of blogs that .9999 fine of them can't all be scintillating with cogent arguments and just-breaking news.

But what can one say about the main stream media? When there is something of import with a need for deep analysis or accurate exposition the MSM is MIA. For proof I need only mention the Danish Cartoon Affair. 99.9999% of Americans who relied solely on television broadcast or the print media had no clue what the fuss was all about.

Although newspapers do print letters to the editor, feedback on stories are too slow to be of any real value. On blogs I can leave a comment 10 seconds after a story breaks and have Joe USA tell me I'm wrong by typing a link showing me where I erred.

Leah McLaren thinks that the story is the story. It is not. The real story is the ping-ponging of thousands of readers' responses to the story. What Joe USA and even what Helmut Europe thinks of the story.

I am certain of one thing: blog readers know more about an issue than the poor shlub who only reads newspapers - if there is such a person.

And before anyone praises the "media professionals" too highly the only person on tv or radio that I ever heard pronounce the word flaccid correctly is Ron Kuby on the Sliwa and Kuby show.

As for accuracy, it was bloggers who corrected Dan Rather. And it is bloggers who dumped on Leah McLaren's writing in No no Leah and here and here and here.

So Leah, may I call you Leah?, the notion that the blogosphere has nothing to offer you is untrue. It is only the blogosphere that has anything of value to offer. The main stream media is so big, so afraid of offending, so removed from the regular guy that it is bland and uninforming. Come back to the blogosphere. Without bloggers' voices you'll be all alone.

Related blogs/websites:
bad example - SEVENTH OCCASIONAL JERKY AWARDS , Excerpt: Information found on blogs is at least as accurate as information found in the mainstream media.

Leah's website for promoting her book The Continuity Girl.

Gremolata interview with Leah McLaren

Leah McLaren was born in Peterborough, Ont., in 1975. As a teen she attended Claude Watson School for the Arts in Toronto, followed by stints studying English literature at McGill and Trent University, where she received a bachelor's degree in 1998.

At eighteen she interned at and wrote a feature for the daily newspaper the Globe and Mail where she now writes her regular Saturday column. Since then she has contributed to a variety of publications including the McGill Daily, Toronto Life, ROB, Flare, Fashion and EnRoute.