The Chicago Tribune is a newspaper that, as others have said about the Wall Street Journal, possesses Cracker Jack reporters and a crackpot editorial board. The Trib's editorial writers continually display a fealty to George W. Bush and his party that must have the ghost of Colonel McCormick dancing a jig in the hallways of his Cantigny estate.
But in today's (2/22/06) edition, the Trib outdoes itself with an editorial that manages to both repeat a thorougly debunked slander of Al Gore and displays a "whistling past the graveyard" mentality towards blogs and their supposed death.
Bloggy, we hardly knew ye
No sooner had Al Gore invented the Internet than early adopters discovered a liberating opportunity: Anybody with a modem and an ego could share his or her thoughts with the world.
Want to read more, plus learn who to share your thoughts with at the Trib? Follow me below the fold.
You're forgiven if you cling to the conventional wisdom that blogging, like half-pipe snowboarding, enjoys an unrelievedly rich future. Forgiven, but maybe behind the curve. A new report from Gallup pollsters, "Blog Readership Bogged Down," cautions that "the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative in the past year."
Gee, if that's true, it would mean that blog readership is doing considerably better than newspaper readership. The Tribune, which has been hemorrhaging readers for years, would love to be able to tell their stockholders that they had staunched the exodus. A growth of "nil" iin its readership is currently a goal of the Tribune Corporation.
Gallup finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, with 11 percent reading them occasionally. Thirteen percent of Internet users rarely bother, and 66 percent never read blogs.
Golly gee! It's a good thing they didn't cite the polls that indicate that more people than ever are making the internet their number 1 news source (although of course not all internet news sites are blogs.)
Gallup's report gives a nod to the chattering class--that segment of inordinately dialed-in Americans who are enthralled with, or at least entertained by, one another's opinions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
... So blogging has a future, however indefinite. At least till Al Gore invents the Next Big Thing.
So you see, fellow Kossacks, we're all just members of the "chattering class." You know, that class of annoying folk who like to point out to the whores in the RWCM as often as it takes, that Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet. That he merely cited, in reference to his congressional career, that he had "taken the initiative" in sponsoring legislation that allowed the internet, a government developed program, to flourish. That in 2005 he received a lifetime achievement Webby Award for his three decades of contributions to the internet.
The editor of the Chicago Tribune's editorial page is Bruce Dold, who can be e-mailed at bdold@tribune.com
The paper's letters to the editor address is ctc-TribLetter@Tribune.com
Their ombudsman is Don Wycliff, who can be reached at dwycliff@tribune.com.
(Wycliff, BTW is a good man who is leaving the paper next month.)
So, fellow members of the chattering class, I think it would be fun to contact these folks, particularly Mr. Dold, and give them a taste of the power of the blogs.