Image by lynnftw via Flickr

A Vancouver blogger, Lisa Bettany has written a thought-provoking piece for The Province on how celebrity sites like Perez Hilton are giving blogs a bad name.

As a well-known blogger, Bettany, has a personal stake in the issue.

She argues that part of the blame lies with the established media:

The mainstream popularization of trashy, trite, and slovenly written blogs like PerezHilton.com is giving bloggers a bad name.

For many people who aren’t exploring the intense array of intelligent and thought-provoking blogs on the web, Perez might be the only blog they read. And that is one of the great tragedies of the web.

This is exactly what leads many to claim that blogging isn’t journalism. Or to pronounce, as a senior academic said at last week’s ONA convention, “I hate blogs”.

This is like dismissing magazines because of the trashy magazines at the supermarket checkout. Blogging is a platform. Blogs are a form of media native to the web that shares some characteristics, such as an informal, personal and conversational tone.

But the nature of the content is up to the blogger. It can range from celebrity gossip to informed comment to an online journal.

It is time to stop making assumptions that all blogs are like Perez Hilton.