Simon Jenkins, the former editor of The Times, offered a comparison in January 2008 that this post took apart. A newspaper column, on his account, is like writing “a collected essay”, while blogging is like “laying down your pen, going to the pub and telling the guy next to you what you really think”. He went on: “It’s the difference between writing and a bar room chat, which is why I can’t take it terribly seriously who answers you back - it’s the sort of people you would get answering back in a bar chat”.
The objection made here was the same one levelled at the wider “blogging isn’t journalism” argument: a newspaper column and a blog are different forms of media, and judging the second by the conventions of the first confuses form with content. Jenkins, it was noted, was smart enough to know the difference.
The counter-evidence offered was a scoreboard rather than a theory. Five of the 20 winners at that year’s Online Journalism Awards were blogs.