Worse than that. Some bloggers are openly begging for paid work in the MSM, or less openly, by producing high quality pieces on top-end group blogs and waiting to be scouted by the big leagues. How do we sleep at night - bunch of sell-outs that we are? ;)
# posted by  Andrew @ 13:34

 

Scandalous indeed.
# posted by  Jarndyce @ 13:58

 

Seriously, though: there's a big difference between being available for paid work (which I would expect any decent blogger to be) and squealing like a girl when you don't get a lunch invite.
# posted by  Jarndyce @ 14:32

 

Has to be said, I had less than no idea (nor interest) about Recess Monkey's ethnicity. The only prejudice I have against any blogger is that I always used to assume they were all geeky child prodigies, and now I assume they're all geeky 30-somethings to middle-agers.

Oh - and you missed me off the list of whinging bastards. But then they quoted my whinging in the Saturday edition, so I RULE. Ha!

(Still haven't got any paid work off the buggers though... Perhaps it would help if I actually PITCHED something at them?)
# posted by  Nosemonkey @ 15:03

 

Well said, Jarndyce. Surely the only points of blogging are because a) it's fun and b) we like to think we have something valuable to say?
# posted by  Ken @ 16:01

 

J: Yes, of course. But the squealing tells you a lot in itself, as you said (cf beaten wives, and all that).
# posted by  Andrew @ 16:46

 

I can honestly say that fame hasn't affected me at all.

Sure Angelina Jolie pops round and sometimes it's difficult to get Kirsten Scott-Thomas to leave. But I'm still the bear I ever was - still producing execrable blogging that would test the patience of the blind.

What do you mean you've never heard of it? Bastards...[grabs bottle]...you'll all be sorry one day...I'll show you...[points at moon and starts shouting]
# posted by  The Bagged Bear @ 20:04

 

Well, yeah. After all blogging is a great deal about ego, isn't it?
After all, the fact that we noble bloggers point out that the MSM, the politicians, the great and good - in short all those who wield power over us in one form or another - are not as upstanding as they would like us to believe they are is hardly a great - or even a surprising - revelation is it?
The reason I gave up serious blogging (yes, apparently I'm in The Book too, but my promised complimentary copy hasn't turned up yet, so I can't confirm that) was that I didn't like what I was doing, or - to be accurate - the sort of person it was turning me into, precisely the kind of thing you nail in your piece.
What gets me though about all this MSM patronising - in both senses - of blogs is that it always tends to be a round up of the same old suspects - a handful of the political blogs. Don't get me wrong, most of them are regular ports of call for me, but not for the politics, but for the style. Good writing matters far more to me than political persuasion. Maybe that is because politics - other than in its current form of being just show business for ugly people - is dead. Apart, that is, from that bunch of blogs that still occupy the trenches of the left and right still left over from the last class war - lobbing their hand grenades of irrelevance at each other to little or no effect.
So what am I saying? I think it is that political blogging is mostly ineffective - if often entertaining - apart from the occasional lucky shot like Scott's Extreme-Islamist outing at the Guardian, and that probably, it is best seen as a sort of Sunday league journalism where occasionally one of its brightest stars can be picked from obscurity by the MSM's talent scouts.
For all the big talk about how blogs are - or are about to - transform the face of journalism etc, I don't actually think they are all that good as a medium, certainly not as good as good old old-fashioned newsgroups for debate, discussion, argument, for example.
Oh, by the way, I do still blog - but a strangely surreal thing that seems to tickle the funny bones of some who read it, just as much as it does mine to write it - which is enough for me. Anyway, I figure that now Alan Coren et al are getting on a bit soon the MSM are going to be looking for some new 'humour' columnists, so I want to be ready when they call.
# posted by  Norbert Trouser-Quandary @ 10:10

 

Well 'Lenin' has hissy fits all the time. He's even had a few in the comments on my blog.

As I am as likely to be offered a job in journalism as to be elected to the European Parliament, I will continue to slag journalists off with drunken abandon.

Seriously though Mr J, a good post and a great re-design of the blog.
# posted by  Steve @ 11:41

 

I don't think it's so much part of a Sunday League as the fact that any footballer has a chance of pulling something totally unlikely out of the hat.

That is, every so often there are exceptional pieces of blogging. The Pickled Politics post on Apu, for example, or Ed Rooksby's post on violence. And it is the freedom of the medium that allows genius like that to come through. But ultimately, a lot of the time we are duffers. We just hope practice makes perfect!
# posted by  Ken @ 20:26

 

it's difficult to get Kirsten Scott-Thomas to leave

In that case, I'd have thought you'd have learnt to spell her name by now, BB. ;)
# posted by  Oscar Wildebeest @ 12:23