Bloggers Should Shake Fists at Clouds and Say the Obvious

Jim writes how blogging can feel like being the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, a feeling I often encounter myself: You feel like someone gone mad: “Is anyone else seeing the same thing I’m seeing? And we’re just ok with this?” Very often, those are the best posts I read from others. Indeed. Back in college when we used to run a newspaper, I had a column about the Middle East, and I had a blog about the same thing. At that time, I was a journalism minor. We had a teacher whom I feel weird calling a professor, as he didn’t have a PhD or even a doctorate; he was simply a professional journalist. He used to say journalism was dying, that he was one of the last dinosaurs, and that he advised me to “stay the hell away from this profession” if I cared about my soul. Much of the energy I feel in Jim’s posts stems from the same place. We don’t bother with well-known facts (like ads flying in our faces left and right, as his article mentioned on Daring Fireball) because we all know them,…