COR this is good.

Digby send me an email… Why a senior publisher is not interested in publishing books by major journalists who are underrepresented in the blogosphere. From PressThink, the blog of New York journalism academic, Jay Rosen.
There are some very telling points made about the power of blogs in this post by Eric Nelson, a senior editor in current affairs and history at Wiley and Sons:

'...if absolutely no one is blogging your stuff, no one’s reading it in the paper either.'

Towards the end he distinguishes the experienced journo from the garden variety blogger, but his sympathies seem to lie with the blogosphere:

'The truth is most bloggers are editors, picking the best bits of the web to show their readers; they are not reporters or architects of elegant policy arguments. The ones that are reporters and architects, usually have a pretty good non-digital resume to back it up.'

All good stuff, but what spoke most eloquently to me was the first comment to this post, about the ordinary blogger ( presumably by an 'ordinary' blogger):

'We are part of the private, recent, non-geek, non-old-boy bloggers, with insignificant stats, who think aloud in public, becoming a part of varied conversations, adding a nano-gram to consensus or controversy on certain subjects, and occasionally achieving a mini-scoop by virtue of observation or privileged access in our own circle.
When in retrospect blogs are evaluated, we believe it will be this kind of ordinary educated citizens' distributed intelligence with its impact on the market and the polity, including the expressive content of millions who also read the expression of others, that will have rumbled the tectonic foundation of our common life.'

Rumble on. We may feel anxious about legislative attempts to keep the top bloggers' identities out in the open, but they are 'one and we are many, and from all the lands on earth we come.'