Looks Like a Duck, Walks Like a Duck, Quacks Like a Duck...

Is it just me, or are the journalists all circling the wagons around themselves and referring only to other journalists when they talk about blogs?

Now that Peter Rost is a journalist blogger and ensconced in the journalist tent over at BrandweekNRX, his first post -- aside from the one about himself -- is based on an interview with Christiane Truelove, an editor at Med Ad News and author of Pharma Blogs: Week in Review (see "The Med Ad News editor has a secret . . .").

"I fear that a blogger who doesn't have a solid journalism background can get into trouble and get the story wrong, if they don't do good fact-checking," Truelove says. "That's the worst about blogging."

Only a journalist with tremendous resources available from Med Ad News can get on his/her high horse and bemoan the fact that bloggers sometimes don't get the story right! As if journalists are infallible that way (remember Dan Rather?).

Journalist bloggers may be dominating the opinion pages of trade publications and trade conferences, but they are not what "traditional blogging" -- never thought I'd see that in a sentence! -- is all about.

The true blogger is outside the mainstream media which have tremendous resources behind them to gather information; the true blogger doesn't have a staff of fact finders/checkers, graphic artists, and ad people helping them; the true blogger does not have huge advertising incomes that are at risk when they write a story that offends a hand that feeds them.

In spite of all that, the true blogger successfully COMPETES with the journalist blogger for readers and often is rated higher in credibility and usefulness by their readers than journalist bloggers!

I also note that journalist bloggers have so much time to devote to blogging, they virtually shut out all the other voices with multiple posts every day! This is blogging diarrhea of the worst sort!

Once bloggers have all the resources and income that journalists have, they cease to be bloggers and are just journalists writing blogs.

IMHO, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it IS a duck, not a blogger!