Good post on the “journalist-blogger” on how any of them are simply old school journalists in bloggers clothing.

What Marc is really complaining about is being a print journalist in spirit forced to pretend to be a blogger.

Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog » Blog Archive » Bloggers who aren’t

this is the crux of it:

He speaks of faking it when he says “I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called “Marc Ambinder” that people read because it’s “Marc Ambinder,” rather than because it’s good or interesting.”

Neal’s basic beef is with the “result” of all this:

the mainstream press has infiltrated and, in some ways, taken over the blogosphere, even though they don’t really understand it.

Yet another symptom of the way old media “tacks on” new media as if it’s an extension of the old,  and can be used to further the old,  rather than …uh…be what it is: an opportunity for a better,  more wholistic and democratic medium that evades the grasp and control of the old media entrenched forces.

As a church communicator/technologist,  I am seeing this happen in church and denominational journalism.  There is a lot of “blogging” happening that is posturing;  cloaking old media expectations and forms in “dumbed down” new media contexts.  Not to say that there aren’t many “true bloggers” in church communications.  There are.  I follow many of them on Twitter and Facebook,  and read their blogs to which they often link.  But to many of these “true bloggers” (and I consider  myself tobe one,  pardon my lack of humility or ,  you might even think “hubris”),  the efforts at “new media” communication are all too obviously clueless.