Blog on Blog on Blog

Via Colby Cosh, this is an interesting piece on the Canadian blogging community which, you may be surprised to learn, consists almost entirely of moonlighting mainstream media journalists. That aside, a couple of comments:

1) The author (Samantha Israel), argues that the idea that blogs can be self-correcting is wrong because, as she says, "I've been corrected by a reader only once".

So let's make it twice - her comment (further down) that, "The [mainstream media] certainly bit back when it revealed that Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who averages more than 350,000 visitors a day to his Daily Kos political blog, was paid US$12,000 to promote Howard Dean's campaign for the Democratic nomination." is in fact misleading, bordering on spreading a lie (IMO).

In fact this information was "revealed" by Markos himself as soon as it happened and prominently displayed on his blog, as some 'lazy' Internet research will tell you quite quickly.

2) There is a long discussion of editing and how it differs between the mainstream media and blogs. On a not-so unrelated note, here is the headline from today's Vancouver Sun: Lung cancer in women reaches epidemic level

I appreciate that newspapers have a duty to serve the public interest by taking minor issues and making them seem really scary and important through the use of large fonts in order to make money by selling papers, but some respect for the language would be nice. The steady increase of lung cancer rates isn't good but it isn't an epidemic (it's not even contagious). Perhaps they just meant it in the sense of "Widely prevalent" but, besides also being untrue, that would be a bit misleading given that we're talking about a medical condition here. And just what is the 'epidemic level' anyway?

Anyway, I'm criticizing because - well, that's what I do here - but the article on blogging by Israel was interesting and worth a read all the same.