WILL: It’s about narcissism, which is why a mirror is absolutely perfect. So much of what is done on the web is people getting on there and writing their diaries as though everyone ought to care about everyone’s inner turmoils. I mean it’s extraordinary.
His words alone do not paint the full picture. Go watch the video, he is clearly fully disgusted by the fact that anyone in the traditional media would give bloggers the time of day. Well, I've got news for him. He is biting the hand that feeds him.
Newspapers are dying on the vine. They're just hemorrhaging readership, and if there is one group of people propping them up, it's bloggers. If it wasn't for bloggers commenting on the stories they publish, and driving readers to their online versions they'd be in even worse shape. Perhaps Will should ask his editor, Fred Hiatt, why he chose to run his own editorial about Iraq in today's paper rather than yesterday's Sunday edition. It's simple, Monday stories now carry more weight due to blogging.
In the money demographic, aged 25-54 only about half of Americans read a newspaper daily, so the thirteen percent that read blogs everyday represent about twenty-six percent of their readership, and the large blogs have as large a readership as a large newspaper does. They need us if they are going to survive.
We need them to, it's not like we do much actual reporting. We get our material from them, but as blogs mature that might change, and Will and the others might just be completely marginalized.
