[LINK] Fulford on Blogs

[rfmcdonald]

In this month's Toronto Life, critic Robert Fulford argues in his "Blog's Age" that blogs' transformatory potential is limited, that for the most part they exist in the niches of popular culture, and, in his concluding paragraph, that they have precedents.

The writers who produced the slim politics-and-gossip newspapers of early-18th-century London were unpaid, sometimes scurrilous, often unreliable, and always dedicated to criticizing power that they considered illegitimate. One of their most famous contributors, Junius, still gets quoted every day on the Globe and Mail editorial page. Their main customers were the owners of coffee houses, which were sometimes called “penny universities” because you could buy a cup of coffee for a penny and read all the news and comment for free. The writers producing those papers invented journalism, a new way of looking at the world. Bloggers, their natural descendants, may also be creating the sensibility of the future.

Reactions to the article can be found at Torontoist and BlogTO. Myself, I have to agree with Fulford on this one.