Research before you write - even about blogs

The Guardian’s published a great piece about the relationship between the mainstream media and bloggers. I think the heart of the piece lies here:

From the dawn of blogging it’s been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable. Epitomising this stance most recently is Tom Wolfe – who, in a brief essay accompanying the Wall Street Journal’s blog birthday celebration, dismissed the blogosphere as “a universe of rumours”. To support this charge, he cited an inaccuracy in Wikipedia’s entry about himself. Of course the online encyclopedia is not a blog at all. But critics like Wolfe can’t be bothered making distinctions.

And the irony here is that too many people in the media, a profession founded on research, attack from a position of ignorance.

And that’s not going to be a good way of winning…