Daily Blog To Purgatory

Blogging is a full time profession for some. There are good bloggers out there who write very informative news articles. After all, it’s the bloggers that have redefined news media; you now have an iReport on CNN.com and the blogger can be first to break an important news story as it’s happening.

But the old print style of media, in its heyday, had language in its favor; but for the blogger, things are a lot different. Let me show you what I mean.

Ask yourself: does this work? Let’s see.

Have you heard these terms before…

“When we went to press…” OK, some news had developed after the paper went to print.

Let’s try the blog.

“When we went to blog…” Um… we can’t assume some news developed. Language does not work.

“All the news that’s fit to print.” OK, maybe not everything is newsworthy.

Let’s look at the blog.

“All the news that’s fit to blog.” No, but almost anything can be blogworthy as long as it’s for a good cause.

I could write more phrases and see if the word blog fits. But perhaps it does not work well because the blog term, in and of itself, is truncated. However, if we rephrase and use the proper nomenclature of the word (blog): “Web log,” incorrect usage starts to be eliminated.

Therefore, if we try to say: “when we went to Web log;” this can start to bring proper word-use into focus while naming the tool that is actually being used similar to its newspaper cousin.