The Scene

I had written an entire, lengthy post about the Scene's latest anti-blogger sneer, and I was pretty happy with it. But I deleted it. Why? Because, frankly, the back-and-forth between the Scene's J-school flunkies and the bloggers they mock is just old. Nothing new is ever said. They call us navel gazers. We call them pretentious twits who don't get it.

Here's the deal. I never set out to have a blog that would replace The Scene. I only set out to have a place where I could say what I thought about any one of ten dozen topics. Sometimes those topics are covered by the Scene, sometimes they aren't.

As far as I'm concerned, blogs are the new babies of the First Amendment. Blogs do what newspapers did 150 years ago. They give the common person a voice. The irony of the First Amendment is that while it guarantees a person's right to free speech it offers no guarantees about any rights to be listened to. Therein lies the war between blogs and the press. We're fighting over listeners. And it seems that there are many within the press who begrudge us lowly bloggers any audience at all. We haven't earned our audience through the pains of J-school and fancy reporting footwork. But we have people who do listen to us. That I have a bit of speech anyone listens to is a shock and a blessing. I will most likely never have the readership of The Scene for this blog. And that's fine with me.

But I have the comfort of being able to say exactly what I think and have people interact with my ideas on a daily basis.

I also have been able to retain the dignity of humanity. I know that it's not a good idea to insult the people who read me, to mock them and pigeonhole them.

It'd be nice if The Scene would get some of that dignity back. Then again, I personally don't read them that much anymore.