The Chicago Tribune Has Its Finger On Blogging’s Pulse

In the kind of intra-masthead sniping one would expect to find on Fishbowl, Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn is trash-talking the paper’s unintentionally hilarious “Bloggy, we hardly knew ye” editorial that attempted to show up all of us blog-mad New Yorkers. “You’re forgiven if you cling to the conventional wisdom that blogging, like half-pipe snowboarding, enjoys an unrelievedly rich future. Forgiven, but maybe behind the curve,” the paper’s editors wrote. It was Wired’s “Great Web Wipeout” story ten years after the fact, not to mention hopelessly sincere.

So Zorn has a right to be upset that he’s enduring all of blogging’s negatives and basking in none of the hype: “I often get e-mail and phone calls congratulating or castigating me on a “column” that was, in fact, a blog entry that ran only online at chicagotribune.com/changeofsubject. And that’s another reason I’m unpersuaded by the sepulchral mutterings over the supposedly twitching corpse of blogs: They’re now often so well integrated into other Internet offerings that people don’t even know they’re reading them.” Including his editors.

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