Tom Coates fact-checks the BBC

Christian Crumlish

Ordinarily, Tom Coates of plasticbag.org defends professional journalism as the province of dedicated newgathering resources and standards of professionalism, although, as he notes in On 'two years' of weblogs...,

[A]bsolutely anyone who's ever been featured in a news story ... knows full well that journalists routinely seem to get quite important and easy-to-check facts wrong.

The gaffe this time? A bunch of brainless copy form Bill Thompson at the BBC (All over for blogs?), in which he wonders how webloggers have kept it up for two long years now with only their cats to blog about. What exercises Tom is this idea that blogging has only been around for two years, when it was six years ago that Jorn Barger gave "web log" its new connotation (before that it was - and still is - sometimes used to refer to server logs), and some consider the first What's New page at CERN to have been the first weblog over twelve years ago, blah blah.

It is an especially weak error, when you consider that the New Yorker did an article on Megnut and Kottke nearly three years ago. It's the cat comment, to me that gives away the lazy writing.