Twilight, my patootie!

A story like this one from Slate.com is supposed to get your
attention not by what it contains, but by what it implies,
and by what its headline promises but doesn't deliver.

Blogs over as a business? Another way to looking at it is to
question whether blogs as a business have ever really got off
the ground. Slate doesn't ask that question. I don't expect
any other media to ask the question.

I suggest this is another variation on the old media game of
"bash the new kid." Probably the first ones to play the game
were monastic scribes. I can see them now, scribbling
away at the rate of a page a day, when movable type appeared.
Something like this:

 It's an untried technology, a bubble driven by
reckless speculation. All these resources are
being put into a product without regard for market.
After all,hardly one person in twenty can read,
and most of them are us.

It's dangerous, too. Young children get hurt around
those big presses! Look! Here's another example! One
printer's apprentice injured for every 20,000 sheets
of production! And that type is made of lead, you know.
Who knows how much lead you'll absorb every time you
pick up one of those books?

The subject here isn't really blogs as a business, but the
threat blogs pose to other news media. Blogs as business put
that into a form the competitors can understand and fight.
Blogs without the business model drop back into the category
of amorphous fear, an informational thing that goes bump
in the night.

If I were betting, my candidate for failure would be Slate.com.
It now focuses excess energy on non-stories, none at all on
stories of real substance, and does it all with a sort of rote
weltschmertz that fails to entertain, inform or enlighten.