The Daily Mail's Keith Waterhouse's priceless view of bloggers
Oh how I love the Daily Mail. What a splendid newspaper. No really. Its online offering is now very good to the point where a US-exiled liberal friend of mine confessed to me the other day that after the Gruniard, it is his first online stop for UK news. If the Fleet St gossip is right too the Mail's site is really starting to take off and could well become one of the biggest UK online portals.
So the paper does itself no favours when it lets its columnists write utter shit like this. Yep, Keith Waterhouse, a man who is guaranteed a place in heaven for penning the wonderful Billy Liar, has a pop at Googlers (whatever they night be) and Bloggers who he argues don't have an original thought between them.
Mmm odd that when there is a great deal of talk in PR circles about how blogging is setting the news agenda and it is national newspapers who are pinching all the blogger's stories.
Another priceless classic is '
'They never acknowledge original authorship, believing as they do that googling has outmoded the law of copyright.'
Which paper do you write for Keith? is it the Daily Mail which very rarely links out to stories on other sites yet quite happily claims them as its own?
Like the story it ran the other day on the Fembot for sale on eBay. A story which first appeared on our blog Bayraider and was the result of our journo spending hours trawling the site looking for goodies.
Ultimately with Keith it boils down to the fact that the number of people who are interested in his tablets delivered from on high, is dwindling.
Personally I prefer to read opinions that aren't just ill-informed rants (which ironically he says is true of bloggers) but Keith everyone has a right to an opinion, even you.
Not only is his rant ill informed nonsense of the sort you'd get from the pissed bloke in the park, he doesn't seem to understand even the basic terms that he uses. He seems to talk about 'googlers' and bloggers as if they are the same thing, just because they share a few of the same letters. Of course he's entitled to his opinion, but you'd have thought if he's been paid all that dosh to write his column he'd have actually have spent time doing his research. As it is, it reads like a piece from a fella who has never switched a computer on in his life.
Posted by: chris price | October 5, 2006 2:02 PM
I completely agree with Chris, but also with several of the commenters on the Daily Mail site - the man sounds like a journalist horrified at the thought of a conversation happening without him dictating the agenda/opinion. Shame. I liked Billy Liar (still do, just disappointing to see legends bringing themselves low).
Posted by: Adam Vaughan | October 20, 2006 1:05 PM
Journalists are peeved and are lashing out, as they have lost their privelaged and quite undeserved position of being the main interlocutors within society. Thankfully, the internet allows us to get views from people who are far far better educated then journalists on any subject one cares to mention.
KW should take a look at blog sites such as "EU referendum". If he dares, he might like to debate there on any political issue such as the EU policy, or defence policy, scientific and technological matters, with the blogsite's owner.
So to journalists in the "dead tree media" - get used to it.
Posted by: DP111 | January 8, 2007 11:32 PM
I like your point about blogging setting the news agenda (AND it is national newspapers who are pinching all the blogger's stories).
Listening to the Today program on Radio 4 this morning, I was surprised at how many text and email messages they read on air that provided comment to today's news story.
The spheres of influence are changing and citizen journalism is alive! Now we just need a way of knowing how credible 'joe public's' opinion is.
Posted by: Michaela Carmichael | February 21, 2007 11:48 AM