If this is war...

There's plenty wrong with the Forbes blog attack article, not the least being that that author Lyons is wielding a blunt axe and swinging it wildly. ("He swings! He misses.") There's plenty to be said about that (especially regarding Sys-Con, SCO and the hatchet job he does on Pamela Jones) but in the meantime, this article in Rolling Stone, The New Web Slingers limns more of the reasons that blogs have the old media worried.

Clearly, it was the wrong moment to declare war on the blogosphere. Barely a week before the New York Times went public with its baffling account of ex-star reporter Judith Miller's unholy entanglement with vice-presidential aide "Scooter" Libby, the paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, proclaimed that Weblogs do nothing more than "recycle and chew on the news." Pride, as ever, goeth before the fall.

Caught flat-footed on the CIA-leak story, the Times saw its lunch handed to it by the new blogging elite. Leading the charge were the upstart gumshoes of RawStory.com, the pundits of the Huffington Post and a rear guard of Internet editorialists, all taking the Gray Lady to task for failing to practice the very "journalism of verification" that Keller claimed set the Times apart.

(And what's that "entanglement" between Miller & Libby about?)