That’s because they’ve been insulting bloggers for years now - we are all just noodniks, you know, who don’t do any fact-checking or use reliable sources. Any old geek can be a blogger but only the media guys can be the ones who decide what people should know. Don’t laugh, a guest on a recent public affairs show said that.

What a crock. What he probably meant was that publishers, editors and advertisers wouldn’t be telling people what to think if everybody were an unfettered amateur.

They can copy the format but I suspect they have been so corrupted by the decline and fall of a once respectable media that without the drive that makes people run blogs - for free, yet - because they have something important to say, it just doesn’t cut it.

Most of the feature articles aren’t much better, in the humble opinion of this lowly pamphleteer.

Although the blogs are attached to the newspaper websites, it appears that journalist standards are thrown out the window. My town’s paper is putting very odd videos and “cartoons” under their “blog” heading and one of the leading political bloggers called out a local reporter who seemed to have decent stories in the newspaper, but wrote totally off-the-wall-you’d-think-this-person-knew-better political commentary on the newspaper’s blog.