Andrew Marr Vs The Blogosphere

Andrew Marr - BBC Political Presenter (Has the AM Show on a Sunday) has today launched a stinging attack on the many contributors on the Blogosphere, speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Mr. Marr said that Bloggers (or Citizen Journalists) are mostly "socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed, young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting." Adding that "They are very angry people"

Now as you can imagine this has caused a bit of a backlash on the blogs as many bloggers feeling very offended have set out to attack Andrew for his views, personally it is not something I am about to do as despite Mr. Marr's assertions I am not single, living in my mother's basement or for that matter angry. There is a chance that this could be caused instead by the fact that I do not consider myself as a Citizen Journalist rather just someone who enjoys writing about stuff I care about and if someone wants to read it then that is great, but if not - oh well.

Anyway my view on this topic is that he is probably right in some of these cases, I have read a lot of blogs and many are very one sided and angry where the person has an axe to grind and they will grind it until they are left with just a stump, but on the other hand some blogs and bloggers are starting to invade the main stream Ian Dale springs to mind, this new type of journalism is responsive and exciting, blogs tend to break stories at a much greater speed than more conventional media and also operate outside many of the laws that hold our mainstream media firms back (Note I am not saying this is good, simply more exciting.) but again I agree with Mr. Marr when he states that these blogs are unlikely to replace older media companies as after all whilst blogs can be a great source, you still go to a recognised brand to get the facts.

Blogs are also often quite useful to a reporter on a deadline as I am sure most bloggers have has parts of their blogs used in print media as if they have given a quote directly to the press, it happened to me a few times whilst I was a local councillor, so I cannot help but wonder if the problem Andrew Marr has with blogs is due to a slightly embarrassing incident in which he lifted a story from a blog and finding it was less than true.