Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

This is my truth, now tell me yours - Nye Bevan

The Irish Times ran an anti-blogging article which is funny because the Times has been the most supportive of the medium thanks to the likes of Karlin Lillington and Danny O’Brien. Heck my blog is even linked to from the Irish Times website. (Slugger, Damien and Gavin have also commented about it)

Brian Boyd gets it so wrong that his article is a pretty funny read. Unfortunately registration is required so I’ll just have to give you a general overview. Basically Boyd thinks that blogs are a medium for crazy people to express their extremist views and that people led about or insulted on them have no right of recourse, but to start their own and fight back. He finishes a quote from Nye Bevan which I have also used as a retort to open this post, “This is my truth, now tell me yours.”

What Brian fails to understand is these crazy views that he seems to think only exist on blogs are never expressed in real life. People talk, it’s a simple fact of life. What is important to people gets picked up and reported on by the media. Blogging helps that process because a journalist doesn’t have to be there to hear what you said or know someone that was at an event. As a medium the Internet is a much more efficient way for journalists to get information.

Seriously, journalists need to get over it already. The public are their source of information, blogging is just another extension of how we express ourselves. Like Michael O’Connor Clarke says the sooner the media realises it’s not a case of ‘Them or Us, it’s You and Me’ then we’ll have better media. (Great to see the Flackster is back at last!)

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