Let’s face it, for the likes of News Digital and Fairfax, almost anybody could have overseen the establishment of an online arm because there was a complete void for online news in Australia before the two biggies got moving. Monetising online news delivery still presents a challenge to all operators but growing traffic back in those days was a piece of cake.

APN has presented a very different challenge as it is a much smaller operator in the print media marketplace. Geographically it has a relatively large footprint within their print division. However, their late entry to the online space meant that their competition had already gained a strong hold on customers within APN’s print market.

Hugh sought to apply the ideas that had been successful almost 10 years earlier for the 2 big players to a very different company and in a landscape that had evolved significantly.

Given APN’s late entry into the online space and their comparably small size, they had the opportunity to both benefit from experience and look for novel ways to engage visitors. Instead of seeking ways to differentiate themselves from News and Fairfax, Hugh essentially created a malformed clone of the competition.

It is not surprising that Hugh would seek to denigrate bloggers as his track record shows that he is very “old school” in his thinking.

The finda project was not Hugh’s idea but he had stewardship over its delivery. Despite the millions of dollars invested in this project, the site still fails to engage customers in any meaningful way. I have followed this site closely since its launch and can see that the site still lingers around the 100-150,000 PV per month but of greater concern is that its page views per visit is only around 2.

The only constant in the online space is change and, in my opinion, Hugh’s old school approach has done a great disservice to APN’s shareholders.

That said, this stuff doesn’t sit in a nice, neat spectrum. Some blogging is awesome, well-researched, in-depth and equally, some journalism is execrable pap. They are both a part of a confusingly fuzzy cloud where any verifiable source has equal validity with any other.

I certainly object to being labeled without the labeler contacting me to verify the assumptions they’ve made. But I’m not going to get overheated about it.

I think there are personalities in the journalism and blogger camps who would seek to maintain the status quo; where we are at each other’s throats and the false dichotomy persists. Not me, though.

Instead of talking about whether ‘journos’ are better than ‘bloggers’, we should really be concentrating on how reporting on the world around us is developing and evolving.

By my reckoning, I now have access to far more sources, from multiple different perspectives, and with the right critical skills I’d like to think I can assess the information on display and make my own mind up.

Surely the extent to which reporting allows us to decide where we stand on key issues in our lives and the lives of others around the world should be the only genuine criteria we should be assessing.

Seriously, where are we anyway? The playground? Some of us went to uni and some didn’t, but either way I like to hear from people capable of using rigorous critical skills to present information and opinion in a transparent manner.

Any rhetorical argument seeking to shut down reason and elicit an emotional response is always going to work for a significant proportion of the world’s population. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should simply strive for an argument that is popular.

Good writing/journalism/thinking is not the exlcusive preserve of anyone. Each instance should be treated on its own merit.

(…and I find the irony of Hugh using blogger to diss bloggers fantastic!)

As an aside, here’s a yarn about one mainstream media professional, possibly even a capital-J journalist, doing what in my opinion is crap blogging. And unethical to boot.