Your humble correspondent is a minor source in Samantha Israel's opus Blogging the spotlight, available now in the Spring 2005 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.

Addendum: I've added my remarks I posted on her blog

Here's where I fit into the picture:

While some believe that blogs are humanizing, others say they're a cheap form of exhibitionism. Bill Doskoch, a CTV.ca writer, started his blog, Media, Politics, Film and Minutiae, in August 2004, and was nominated for Best New Blog at the 2004 Canadian Blog Awards. So it's no surprise that his site generates about 15,000 visitors a month, compared to my measly 1,000 tops. I called to interview him at 11 A.M. one January morning. He'd been posting to his site until after 4 A.M. the night before and I'm pretty sure I woke him up. Doskoch believes his blog makes him a better journalist, and being a journalist makes him a better blogger, but calls the echo-chamber effect their biggest weakness. "Blogs are mostly read by your virtual friends. It's a like-minded club and doesn't offer as much honest debate as it could," he says, adding he's never received one critique. "You need debate to test and strengthen ideas, but most of the people who leave comments on my blog tend to like what I have to say." Other journalists I spoke with take this even further, speaking of bloggers as egomaniacs who like the sound of their own voices. "Blogging strikes me as an arrogant thing to do," says Wells, "and arrogance is not a particular stumbling block for me."

But Ms. Israel also talked with some of the big names in Canadian journo/blogging: David Akin, Andrew Coyne, Paul Wells, Colby Cosh, etc.

Check it out; her yarn is worth a read.

I'll try and comment further upon my return from gainful employment this evening.

What I told her:

Here's what I wrote as a comment at blog on blogs:

So now is the time when I unkindly tear your blog article apart. :)

First, with Coyne's experiment: You should have drawn a more explicit link with blogs as one form of participatory journalism.

With respects to the election prediction experiment, you could have compared it to the results from The Election Prediction Project [ http://www.electionprediction.org/ ], which called the June 28/04 federal vote a little closer (the project worked by having participants make riding-by-riding predictions across the country; it got 268 right out of 306).

While not specifically a participatory journalism project, it was a more successful one than Coyne's.

You wrote:

Blogs strengthen the reader-writer bond, allowing journalists to hear from readers firsthand, while giving readers a stronger sense of the journalist's personality and point of view. Although some critics see blogs as echo chambers for the arrogant and others dismiss them as a fad, defenders argue that the medium offers significant advantages for creators and consumers alike.

I don't know if they're echo chambers for the arrogant so much as echo chambers for the like-minded (which, now that I think about it, was my point in the story. So I guess my views haven't changed. :) ). But I would also note that the hazards of groupthink does seem to be the point of your opening argument.

I would ask, how do you know they offer significant advantages for consumers? In what sense? I would note you didn't interview any consumers.

You didn't spend enough time explaining the difference between websites and weblogs.

I would have thrown in something about how the development of content management systems for the masses (i.e. software like blogware, typepad, blogspot, etc.) allowed those with no technical skills to easily post content to a website.

That is an under-appreciated part of the blog revolution.

Ana Marie Cox, it should be pointed out, doesn't own Wonkette. She is an employee of Gawker Media; Cox could be killed by a bus tomorrow, but Wonkette would live.

You wrote the following:

South of the border, news blogs, such as Power Line, Little Green Footballs, and Free Republic, are even more aggressive watchdogs.

I would be very careful about calling those blogs "news blogs" -- but I would apply the same caution to their liberal equivalents.

Those are some of the most toxic blogs, IMO, because they are so rabidly political that they emanate from a parallel universe. They make Mr. Coyne's conservative-leaning audience look like a utopia of ideological diversity. And there is no internal self-correction within those communities that I've seen.

And for the record, I'll repeat that those blogs exist less to correct the MSM than to attempt to destroy it.

For an admittedly liberal take on this subject, see Citizen Journalists or Partisan Hacks?, by Eric Bohlert in Salon [ http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/08/schiavo_memo/index.html ].

BTW, I think your info about Markos Moulitsas, of Daily KOS fame, is inaccurate. He wasn't paid to promote the Dean campaign on his blog. He was hired to be an Internet consultant to the campaign. He disclosed that on his blog over the course of the three-month contract.

But again, Moulitsas doesn't describe himself as a journalist, he's upfront about being a liberal activist who distributes information.

BTW, I don't think Coyne's statement about editing at the NYT is ludicrous. The Jayson Blair case was a horrible systemic breakdown.

I don't believe Dan Gillmor is down on horizontal editing so much as he is on the dissing of traditional editing.

You wrote:

Even as blogs become serious business, few media outlets have established any policies to govern the practice.

How have they become serious business? What Canadian journalist has been able to quit his day job and make big bucks as a blogger? I believe the number of non-lottery winners who have done so is zero. :)

But if journos' blogs amass enough audience to attract advertising revenue, will that change the balance? What problems could it create?

For example, let's say I work for a public broadcaster and broadcast a popular show on Canadian electronica.

In my spare time, I start a blog. A major electronica label starts sponsoring my blog -- and paying me handsomely for the privilege.

All of a sudden, virtually everything on my public broadcaster's show is from this particular label.

See where I'm going with this?

Another BTW: I don't necessarily feel like I'm doing journalism when I'm blogging -- or vice-versa. They're closely related, but there's a real, if amorphous, line between the two.

You wrote: "(Andrew Sullivan's) post, thanking the 330,000 readers who dropped by on election day, made me wonder if blog readership would die down with the election over." Well of *course* it would!! :) But so what? And if some blogs die right out, so what? Think of the blogosphere as a forest; trees come and go, but barring catastrophe, the forest lives.

I definitely think blogs are not the CB radios of the 21st century.

I would compare their situation to e-mail addresses and Internet access for reporters 10 or so years ago. The bizarre technophobia and paranoia that some editors had for the Internet back then leaves me dumbfounded to this day.

If I can make a prediction, it's that in five to 10 years, every reporter will have a blog. It will be a commonly accepted reporting and communications tool.

Now that I've said all that, it's a decent piece. If I was your prof, I'd give you a B.

Where I think it fell down somewhat was in overall focus and linkage of ideas within the piece.

In terms of my remarks, you quoted me accurately and in context.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.

Cheers
Bill D.