Dear Editor,
I refer to your editorial of April 4 captioned “Newspapers and the blogosphere”. What is astounding, particularly for an editorial that seems to have done its research on blogging in the wider world, is the tangential reference to West Indian blogging and the complete ignoring of local bloggers.
Blogging on Guyana, by persons at home and in the diaspora, has been an established fact for the past three years, with the most respected and notorious of the lot, The Guyana Media Critic (GMC), gaining the quite positive attention of Stabroek News columnist, Bill Cotton, whose alter ego is a veteran media consultant, as far back as two years ago. One other popular, if far less controversial, blog is the Guyana Gyal blog, which has also achieved a great deal of recognition not only by Guyanese readers but the general blogging community as well.
To categorically ignore GMC, Guyana Gyal and the numerous other Guyana blogs shows either a conscious disdain for local bloggers or tragic ignorance of the subject by the editorial writer. I find the editorial’s paternalistic tone (“Surely this is a good thing”, “This ought to be encouraged”, “ought to be welcomed with both arms”) as facetious and as contrived as Hilary Clinton’s offer of the Vice-Presidency to Barack Obama.
Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson
Editor’s note
Neither disdain nor ignorance was to blame for the omission of Guyana blogs. The editorial sought to do no more than consider the complementary/adversarial relationship that has evolved between blogs and the mainstream media all over the world. Since, to the best of our knowledge, no West Indian blogger has yet scooped a national newspaper or television station, or caused the resignation of a major public figure (as foreign bloggers have managed to do on several occasions) it made no sense to mention individual local blogs in this context.
