Jonah Goldberg, in The Corner, regarding weblog awards, et alia:

Journalists are constantly writing stories about blogs, but they don't think the Corner counts because magazine blogs don't fit their storylines about the pajamahedeen and all that....

And a bit later, he quotes a reader:

Why don't hardcore bloggers consider The Corner a blog? Well, ya'll are missing a couple of key elements that separate you from the rest of the blogosphere: a blogroll and links within posts to other blogs.

My reply....

Mr. Goldberg:

There are other elements missing from The Corner that bloggers tend to appreciate — comments and/or trackbacks. Usually, one or the other is good to see. Instapundit has neither, but he does have a blogroll.

On a site such at The Corner, I would not honestly expect to see comments — the trolling and spam would be ridiculous — but sites such as Power Line and Michelle Malkin do implement trackbacks.

I think something else more fundamental is at the heart of it, though: the team at The Corner are professional pundits. Blogging is, at its core, an activity undertaken by people who are not paid to do it. Hence the great deal of disdain circulating in the 'sphere for those bloggers who have been revealed to be paid tools of, say, George Soros.

You folks have, of course, never been the slightest bit shy about who y'all work for. So there's no problem with that as far as the 'sphere sees it. But you are paid to do it.

Now, if at the end of the work day you went home and started posting to your own private blogs — thinking of Malkin, here — that would be a fundamentally different thing.

There is a broad spectrum of online punditry: from little-guy me at home in my pajamas talking about barbecue, to someone like Emperor Misha I who gets a few thousand readers a day, to Instapundit, to "small big-media" sites like The Corner, all the way up to the major news outlets' online opinion pages (which often do have some elements in common with blogs — e.g. a feedback/comment system.) Somewhere in that spectrum is the dividing line between "blog" and "non-blog," and I would put The Corner on the other side of the line.

Regards,
Russ

Update, 12/8: more from The Big Trunk at Power Line.

Posted by Russ at 01:28 PM, December 6, 2004 in Memoranda