As a new blogger I'm still getting the hang of things, but it seems to me that this medium, which is so special because it bypasses the media gatekeepers, is under siege by professional bloggers. (I'll call them ploggers until someone tells me the correct term.)
The beauty of the blog is that it allows just about anyone with an idea (and a computer) to put it out there for public consumption and get feedback. (Note that this was once also said about the entire Internet.)
With that said, there are far too many blogs out there being written by people who have no need for them. I'm talking about political columnists and commentators who already have bylines in major newspapers and/or magazines. The gatekeepers have already annointed people like Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Renyolds (instapundit) and Joshua Micah Marshall (Talking Points Memo) to name just a few. (I intentionally didn't provide links to their sites here. They have enough traffic already.) I wonder if their editors, or better yet their agents, had anything to do with
their decision to launch a blog.
In my mind a blogger is just a regular guy who is taking a huge risk by putting his soul out there for us to see, and he does it alone. Does Andrew Sullivan search the webmonkey HTML cheat sheet to figure out how to wrap text around an image? I doubt it. When I read Talking Points Memo, am I reading Joshua Micah Marshall's raw thoughts or have they been edited just as they would if published by a major newsmagazine?
I guess all bloggers are driven in part by some kind of self-promotion, but can't these professional bloggers stay on their own turf or at least call themselves something else, because in my mind I don't think they're really bloggers.
