It’s more than just not having time to blog after writing newspaper stories, although that’s part of her complaint, and it’s more than just the fact that blogs are filled (she believes) with meanderings and ephemera of little value. There are two key portions of her rant, as far as I’m concerned. The first is where says that:

“Everyone’s a writer now. Everyone’s an editor … this is the democratization wrought by the Web [and] its chief effect, at least upon journalism, is to diminish whatever craft, and there is some, is left in the business.

It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone can write on deadline. It is not true that anyone can do an interview. It is not true that anyone can edit themselves and sort wheat from chaff.”

We’ve all heard this one before, many times — and it still doesn’t hold water. How does blogging, or the fact that anyone can be a writer or an editor, diminish whatever craft is left in the business? If anything, it should make real craftsmanship even more obvious, since there is so much drivel out there. And as I said to someone on Twitter after a discussion of Blatchford’s piece came up, the fact is that everyone can write now, and we had better get used to it. Not everyone can write well, obviously, and not everyone is worth reading. That’s a different question.

The second key part of Christie’s rant is where she says:

“Journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue.”

This is the least defensible part of her argument, in my opinion. Who says journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation? It wasn’t one in the past, that’s true — or only a “carefully-constructed dialogue” — because we didn’t have the ability to create a real two-way discussion. Now we do. Do some people use it to hurl mud, or for self-aggrandizement, or other useless purposes? Of course they do. So do some columnists and op-ed writers, and we seem to cope with that pretty well.

Loren Feldman told me that he agrees with Christie, and that he likes to read what I write, and doesn’t care about the comments. That’s very flattering. And as I said to Loren, there are some things that deserve to be monologues — obviously, we wouldn’t want Shakespeare to have to wade through dozens of inane comments on the weaknesses of his plays, or subject Shelley or Keats to the same thing every time they came out with a new poem. But you know what? Most people, Christie included, aren’t Shakespeare or Keats, and in many cases there are valuable opinions — and Lord knows, even actual facts — that emerge from comments. That has value.

And speaking of comments, here are some good ones:

“You mean mere readers aren’t allowed to dare comment on the written work of their betters? Get out of the ivory tower. Newspaper writing has long been sub-par (yours is a rare exception) and readers are starting to get tired of being fed hastily-written pap.”

“Ironic criticism from a reporter who, over the years, has subjected her readers to page after page after page of verbose prose ABOUT HER DOG.”

“Tom Stoppard once said that a journalist is ’someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he [she] has arrived to cover it.’ You should chew that over Ms Blatchford.”

and one of my favourites:

“Well I didn’t think too much of the article; but I did find some of the comments very interesting, entertaining and insightful.”

The really ironic thing, of course, is that Christie was born to be a blogger. Many of her pieces, even the ones that revolve around news events and more traditional reporting, have a lot of Christie herself in them, and many of her columns are intensely personal. She also writes a lot — way more than the average reporter or columnist. She is a blogger without a blog. I think she just doesn’t want to have to do it all the time, and doesn’t like the fact that people can comment on what she writes.

As with I Can Has Cheezburger, however, which wasn’t the first to come up with LOLcats (that dubious honour goes to the popular 4chan network), the company known as Pet Holdings says it is hoping to put its own “spin” on the Engrish phenomenon. Pet Holdings’ other properties include I Has a Hot Dog (like LOLcats, but for dogs), the political site Pundit Kitchen (like LOLcats but with politicians), Totally Looks Like (celebrities and their lookalikes) and GraphJam.

According to co-founder Ben Huh, who talked with Mike Arrington on video in the TechCrunch founder’s backyard recently (embedded below), the company plans to launch some other sites soon, and also wants to work with some major media partners. The interesting part of the video for me, however, was when Huh started talking about pageviews and revenue. According to the Pet Holdings CEO, the sites get a total of about 3.3 million pageviews a day, and about 5 million unique visitors a month, with the majority of those going to I Can Has Cheezburger and the Failblog (in recent interviews, Huh has said that I Can Has Cheezburger gets about 1.4 million or 1.5 million or 2.2 million pageviews a day).

After Mike presses him, Huh says that the revenue per thousand (RPM) is higher than the average of about 80 cents (it’s not clear whether that’s per ad or per page, but Mike says in his post that it’s per page). As several commenters note at TechCrunch, that puts the site’s revenue somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1-million a year, which is not too shabby for a site with funny pictures. But then Huh says that the company employs 12 people — some to moderate comments, check the photos, run the back-end of the sites, etc. Even $1-million isn’t that much when it has to pay room and board for 12 people, not to mention hosting the photos, bandwidth, etc. And Pet Holdings bought I Can Has Cheezburger from its founders last year for $2-million.

Is there a business model in there somewhere? I’m not sure. (for bonus points, check out what happens when Mike jokingly tells Huh the camera is off at the end of the video).

In a sense, Newscred is trying to take the Digg or Slashdot model a step further. When people Digg a story or link, they are often simply voting on whether they like the topic, or the photo, or in some cases whether they like the person who Dugg the link. Newscred.com wants people to explicitly vote on the credibility of the site itself, (or at least the author of the story or post). As more than one person has already pointed out however, credibility is a difficult thing to measure, and it’s not clear whether it’s the kind of thing that a site like NewsCred is going to be able to outsource or generate through an algorithm. If someone clicks the “discredit” button, is it because they don’t like the author? Or because they simply disagree with them, if it’s a blog?

Although it might complicate things, I’d like to have the ability to see the track record of the individuals who voted to credit or discredit a story, so that I could judge whether they were the type of person whose opinion I valued or not. As a friend of mine has said before about recommendation sites like Tripadvisor.com: What if all of those people like things that I don’t? Then their advice is meaningless. It’s also impossible to know what criteria NewsCred takes into account when it derives its own credibility rating for a specific site. Is it tracking corrections or updates? How much weight do individual rankings carry?

NewsCred isn’t the only site trying to add a layer of credibility to the news. Another service that does something similar is called NewsTrust, a non-profit entity founded by former journalist Fabrice Florin. NewsTrust’s advisory board includes Dan Gillmor and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (who has also financed the site), and the service has gotten a multi-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation, among others. Josh Catone, formerly of Read/Write Web, has a good look at the differences between NewsCred and NewsTrust.

Update:

Shafqat Islam responded via e-mail to some of the points I raised above. Here are his responses:

1) We will be building out social profiles on our site, and allow everyone to see how people have voted. Note that its not our intention to make this a social site - simply to allow users to set up profiles so others can track their voting or simply their source selection. Of course, you will have to opt-in to share some of the sensitive data, but not your votes. That should be transparent as you mention.

2) We plan on using some of this user data to build a recommendation engine. Very similar to what Findory was doing back in the day.

3) You are spot on about the issue with binary voting (credit/discredit). On one hand its simple and a lower barrier to entry for people who want to participate. At the same time, its not granular enough to make meaningful conclusions so we are going to add (in the next few days) an option when you vote to check a few boxes (’not fact-checked’, ‘biased’, ‘no disclosures’ etc) or leave a short explanation.

For the final point about whether people will just vote based on if they agree/disagree, that is a real concern. We are hoping that with a critical mass, the wisdom of crowds effect really does take over and the overall, aggregate knowledge of the crowd will be fairy accurate. Some people will always vote based on their own biases, but we can implement technology to prevent gaming or to detect when a user only votes for a certain source or constantly discredits a journalists.

Blogging isn’t for everyone, obviously. There will always be those who prefer to use Facebook-style networks — or even Marc Andreessen’s Ning.com — because of their simplicity, and hopefully those networks will be able to “federate” or share information with blogs and blog-based social networks, using OpenID or some other similar standard. For those who want more control over their online data and destiny, however (a group I would like to think is increasing), I think blogs and blog-based tools are the best route, and could be a lot more flexible than any other option given the plug-in friendly nature of Wordpress.

There’s also a lot of potential for integrating blogs with tools like Twitter (or Jaiku or Pownce), as well as Friendfeed and others. Om has some interesting things going on along those lines, some of which he announced at the Wordcamp conference this weekend — including a Twitter-feed style micro-blog called GigaOm Daily (more on that here) and a development effort at dev.gigaom.com, where he and the GigaOm team are planning to release something called Gigalogue. According to the description, it is “inspired by” Prologue, a Wordpress theme that turns the blog publishing platform into a kind of group Twitter micro-blog, and there are some more details about it here.

“We don’t want to oversell it, but we really think that with the help of smart media people like you, we can begin to invert the pyramid of only a few people controlling the global conversation, and figure out new ways to liberate great ideas and great writing for an ever-growing avid audience.”

According to the description by Lauerman, the new Salon site or network is both a hosted blog community and a media hub or aggregator. When you go to the open.salon.com site, you get a “cover page” that features posts from a variety of blogs, as well as a tag cloud showing the most popular tags. The page also shows the most highly-rated posts — since blog posts within Open Salon can be given a “thumbs up,” much like other social-media sites (and some mainstream media sites such as globeandmail.com, which has a “recommend” feature on every story). If you set up a blog, you get to add friends, and then their most recent posts appear in your sidebar.

Salon’s cover page feels a little like the front page of Wordpress.com in a way, which also features some content from the blog network. But Salon is planning to go much further (and says it isn’t “one of those giant, anonymous blog networks): not only will it highlight posts on the “cover page” of Open Salon, but top posts will also be featured at the main Salon.com site as well — an interesting step. And the other big move is that Salon has a built-in compensation scheme called Tippem, which uses the Revolution Money payment system developed by former AOL head honcho Steve Case. Tippem is similar to Tipjoy, which I have installed here on my blog but haven’t actually seen used very much.

I think Open Salon is an interesting experiment for the online magazine to make. Although it has some excellent writers and some great content, it’s been awhile since Salon did anything that caused much more than a ripple as far as online media goes, so part of my interest lies in seeing whether the site can pull this off or not. And Salon has certainly put together some or all of the pieces of a new-media strategy: blogging, a Digg-style rating feature, featured content promoted on the main site, and a micro-payment system. Even if it doesn’t work, it should produce some interesting lessons.

Update:

Editor-in-chief Joan Walsh said in a statement that “Open Salon eliminates the gatekeepers [and] makes our smart, creative audience full partners in Salon’s publishing future,” and she has also posted some comments about the launch, including some links to what she describes as the “excellent writing, photography and art, even music, that we’re already getting — stories and posts and images that are as good as what we publish on Salon every day.” Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg, meanwhile, notes in a blog post that Open Salon is the culmination of a project he started several years ago.