Blogger are influentials, or not

Chicago Tribune: “Many people don’t take into account how influential bloggers are,” said Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. “Blogs are getting an increasing readership. People who are going to those blogs are real political junkies who can then reach everybody else.”

But Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, sees only bad news in blogging: “bloggers, with few exceptions, don’t add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.”

Funnily enough, Jones doesn’t do any reporting or offer any evidence in his own little bout of “scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.”

Et tu, Mr. Jones?