Jun 30, 2011

Dooce Coupe?

The following is a comment thread I posted in regarding a news article about a blog war. Isn't THAT an oxymoron?


CyndyHardy 22 minutes ago
Armstrong is a blogger, not a journalist: she is not confined by the 4th wall. YOU don't have the power to control how she chooses to capitalize on her own celebrity.

Good on her for building her brand to where Yahoo sponsored her trip in return for a story. If her personality offends you, TOUGH! The result informed YOU about a sad situation in Bangladesh. Shame on YOU for bashing the messenger. Get off your wallets and do something positive, for a change.

JeannieP 7 minutes ago in reply to CyndyHardy
But her tweets didn't inform me about a sad situation in Bangladesh. Every one of her tweets for the past 24 hours have been about trashing this other blogger. I think it would be great if she used her celebrity for poor people but she isn't. She's using it to be mad at somebody, and I can't even find the tweet where the other blogger attacked her and started it. It is all very confusing and I would rather talk about the poor people.

CyndyHardy 0 minutes ago in reply to JeannieP
Her Twitter profile links to her blog. You'll find her Bangladesh story there.

Twitter is probably just a vehicle for Armstrong to attract blog interest. n fact, her older posts tell how she got into blogging in the first place. Now she makes a good living from it, through advertisers who buy ad space because a lot of people read her blog.

This whole story is relevant to the decline of newspapers because people aren't willing to pay for news. As a result, newspapers can't afford to pay decent salaries, or finance lengthy investigation pieces. While traditional journalists ideally (I said IDEALLY) adhere to a professional code of ethics in news gathering and reporting, bloggers are just people like you who like to write. It is wrong to assume bloggers should be fair, unbiased or even nice.

Some confusion is propagated by stories like this Trib article. It seems to capitalize on the controversy instead of the more important issue in Bangladesh. But, remember, most people would rather read about the cat fight. That generates page views, which generates advertiser interest, which pays Sean Means's salary and theoretically gets people to click through to other news stories.



Raff_The_Sweetling 49 minutes ago
So who's running the kitchen in their households?

CyndyHardy 10 minutes ago in reply to Raff_The_Sweetling
Maybe she's paying a guy like you?
And here is the rest of it. Read more!