Racked with doubts about blogging; and Why Media Is in Crisis.

Guess blogging started out as a hobby and became an obsession. Nowadays, if I don’t blog for a day, I feel as if I am incomplete. Such a feeling of utter desolation. I feel contrite. I guess I will have to give it up for sometime seeing as to how little progress I am making on the novel. So, maybe, I will be regularly irregular, as a teacher used to describe me in school.

But then blogging keeps me writing, keeps me ticking. I feel as if I have exercised after I put the few hundred lines online, like to see it in print, like the feel of my words and cower in pain when I see the bloopers I have committed in a sleepy state the previous night. I am half asleep – as I am now – when I write my blog and that doesn’t help the cause. It’s become a task. An onerous one, if you ask me politely. If you don’t – ask politely, that is – I might scowl at you. Such is a blogger’s mood.

Guess blogging is posing serious competition to established media like television and newspapers. I will tell you how. People these days depend on the net to get news and reportage on happenings. They don’t usually trust the mainline media having been fed up of their transparent lies. (Mediamen, never, ever, ever, lie to your reader or viewer. They are more intelligent than you think.) They find it easy to believe someone in their community of Facebook friends than an impersonal Raj Sardine (just invented this.). Try typing the subject you are looking to read in the search box, the first references that pop out would be from a humbling, bumbling blog. No not NDTV, CNBC, or, for that matter CNN or BBC. Why? I know the answer as a certified Search Engine Optimiser, but I am reserving it for another post.

Where the traditional media bungled – I repeat bungled – is in compromising their credibility. A publisher once said that producing and selling a news paper is like selling pig iron. However, dear esteemed saar, pig iron is NOT what we humble readers want to read every morning.  We want unbiased news. We see corroded pig iron sticking to your pages and avoid it because of tetanus and such like. When threatened with new media, instead of measuring up to the competition with your own financial might, you chose the easy way out: you compromised on your credibility. That’s where you went horribly wrong.  You sold your heart out – for isn’t editorial matter (that little, little scraps appearing between ads) the soul of a newspaper? – , you sold your editorial space and made friends of foes and enemies of friends.

The time is not far when you will never be trusted, quoted, discussed, referred, archived like you used to be. Despite your free supplements – which actually decimate forests and contribute to global warming – your circulations will drop.

Well, um, seven years is a long time to blog continuously, almost every day of the year. A bit of the fatigue and frustration is showing, I guess. But I will press on nevertheless. I think I will never stop blogging.