Charles on… anything that comes along

It’s very interesting to watch Dave Winer discovering the real difference between bloggers and journalists (principally, that journalists try not to bring their personalities to the keyboard).

He writes: “In the last flamefest” [over his abrupt disconnection of weblogs.com] “this is what separated the real reporters, professional or amateur, from the space-occupiers. Did they care what the actual story was, or were they just bloating the blogosphere with more uninformed crap. There was a lot of the latter, very little of the former.”

This is also why I think that John Gruber may get an unpleasant surprise in his desire to become a full-time journalist (which is the thrust of all the T-shirts and Gmail giveaways, unless I’ve completely misunderstood what he’s on about). Sometimes this is a dull job, and it’s surprising how difficult it is in any field to make the transition from enthusiastic and well-regarded amateur to enthusiastic and well-regarded *and successful* professional. I can enjoy writing software, but I also suspect I could hate doing it full time. What you don’t see as an amateur is the grinding nature of doing anything day in, day out. That’s why the reporters could get it right about Dave: it’s no different for them from reporting on who’s going to be the next vice-presidential candidate, or what Tony Blair said in the Commons.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• At last, Dave Winer is famous in Illinois, and all because of blocked email (26 August 2004; score: 47.22%)
• "That wasn't supposed to happen" (22 November 2004; score: 41.42%)
• What is codecasting? Dave Winer's new name for Fraser Speirs's appcasting idea (2 March 2007; score: 38.68%)