Blogging is not reporting. Blogging doesn't do just one thing. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging is what you make it. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging doesn't do just one thing. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging is what you make it.Blogging is not reporting. Blogging doesn't do just one thing. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging is what you make it.Blogging is not reporting. Blogging doesn't do just one thing. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging is what you make it.Blogging is not reporting. Blogging doesn't do just one thing. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging is what you make it.Blogging is not reporting. Blogging doesn't do just one thing. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging is what you make it.Blogging is not reporting. Blogging doesn't do just one thing. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging is what you make it.Blogging is not reporting. Blogging doesn't do just one thing. Blogging is not reporting. Blogging is what you make it.
It would take typing that a few hundred more times to drive home the point to Jason Whitlock that blogging is not journalism, and you don't need that. (As you already understand, since you're reading this, and likely naturally savvy to the notion that EDSBS will not bring you the verified truth, and will instead bring you mostly songs about Norm Chow singing in autotune about having sex with a dolphin.)
Whitlock and many older sports journalists fail to understand this point, so we will state it in clear English. It will be clear of the fancy parentheticals, interesting adjectives Orwell loved so much, or any of the sort of literary devices J-school seeks to beat out of you for no good whatsoever (besides cheap simile and hackneyed metaphor. Those are fine, apparently.)
1. A blog is a medium. A blogger is someone who uses it.
2. Bloggers can do very different things with that medium, and set their own goals. They are not, on the whole, journalists who want your salad fork. (Or pudding shovel, as it were. Damn you fancy parenthetical!)
3. Stop referring to them in a blanket sense without providing specifics. We would not do the same to journalists.
Example!
Sports reporters are lousy writers and worse thinkers.
Clearly unfair, and inaccurate writing based on evidence. This is much, much better:
Jay Mariotti is a lousy writer and can't use think gland want candy.
There we are. Far more accurate, and very, very specific. We don't care if Whitlock wants to reinvent sports journalism, because as he states to a degree of accuracy, we are not sports journalists. Repeating the oppositional canard that bloggers are sports reporters with frontal lobotomies and brimming bowls of Ritalin is tiresome and inaccurate. After all, if we wanted either of those we'd have a subscription to the AJC in its charming and burnable 20th century form, and none of us would be having this discussion in the first place.