Lisa Bettany, a Vancouver blogger with a stake in the answer, argued in The Province in 2008 that celebrity sites were dragging the whole form down. “The mainstream popularization of trashy, trite, and slovenly written blogs like PerezHilton.com is giving bloggers a bad name,” she wrote, and her sharper point was about readership rather than taste: for people who never go looking for the thoughtful end of the web, Perez Hilton may be the only blog they ever read.
That is also the mechanism behind the era’s stock dismissals — that blogging is not journalism, or the flat declaration from a senior academic at that year’s Online News Association convention: “I hate blogs”.
The answer to it is a category distinction. Judging blogs by Perez Hilton is like judging magazines by the ones at the supermarket checkout. A blog is a publishing platform, native to the web, with a family resemblance in tone — informal, personal, conversational. What appears on it is decided by whoever writes it, and the range runs from celebrity gossip through informed comment to a private journal kept in public. The form does not settle the value of the content either way.