Newspapers and Blogs

R. Reuven Spolter writes to The Jewish Week about blogs (link):

While I’ve had my period of infatuation with blogs, I’m pretty much done with them. On the one hand, you can look at them as the “pulse” of the community — an opportunity to see what’s “really going on” inside people’s minds. At the same time, they’re also a place for incredible negativity and sarcasm, and seem to feed off of one another in a closed blog world. I’m not sure blogs are a window into broader communities, as much as a window into the blog community.

In any case, anonymity is what blogs are all about. I can complain about you — or anyone else — by name, without endangering myself or going out on a limb in any way. While I may not like that, it is now a part of the Internet — at least until people get bored of it, which should happen sometime this year.

Newspapers, however, have traditionally been different. If you want to be quoted, you’ve got to go on the record, or at least have some type of relationship with the reporter so that the reporter can vouch for the reliability of the speaker. At least someone knows who the “unnamed sources” are...

There's one media report in which I'm glad not to have been mentioned.