Dear editor,
The bloggers Mr. Lenehan seems to hate so much are link aggregaters–they collect links to information relevant to the topic of their blog’s subject and present them to the audience. Often they have a quick summary of the piece and some commentary on the content, but they almost always contain a link. This is sometimes referred to as an “infomediary” or even “disinfomediary,” but the general idea is that you have someone or something that finds and filters information to give you a “best of” list of information and links.
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Bloggers help people find articles. And then they link to those articles. Do you know what that makes bloggers, Mr. Lenehan? That makes them free advertising for the publications putting those articles online.
Now past the issue of whether bloggers prevent money from flowing to the print media or actually help it, there’s the issue of whether online journalists can do anything besides link to print sources (and help the revenues of the print sources who have an online revenue model). Is there original journalistic content online? Of course. Check out Chicagoist.com. While they link to some print-originated material, they do plenty of original work in areas print publications gloss over. Chicagodailynews.org should be up and running before too long and will be specializing in original material. You can hardly be online for half an hour without accidentally tripping over political commentary. Liberal, conservative–whatever–the commentary is out there. Print columnists expanding their output online, people who are online only. The value of the political commentator is determined by the individual reader, not the editor, and certainly not by whether the commentator’s words are on paper or a screen. It is freedom of what you want to read.
Columbia College
