Nicklas Lundblad writes about Svenska Dagbladet’s op-ed blog “PJ Just nu” in the current issue of Axess (not online yet, and I have not yeat read it). PJ Anders Linder comments on the article in the blog today and says that there are no plans to introduce a comments function on the blog, something that I fully understand. I wouldn’t expect any corporation or organization to set aside the resources for monitoring that kind of instant feedback. But I don’t think that the reasons that Linder points to are valid.
He writes: “SvD’s offer to readers is not to listen to everybody’s opinions about this and that, but to offer a flow of chosen material furnished with personal, hopefully thought-provoking and readable comments. With a completely free comments function the border between SvD and all other web sites would be blurred, the quality label disappear, and the readers nor SvD would benefit from it.”
I think no-one expects an uncensored feedback channel online in any corporate blog. What we would like to see is a representative from big media to open up to the conversation that blogs enable. Traditional media’s monopoly on selecting what is considered to be news and setting the agenda is slowly disappearing, thanks to blogs. The views that Linder expresses shows that SvD maybe considers its blog to be just another vehicle for the same type of information, i.e. another one-way megaphone for the carefully selected and filtered news angles that we already see in the printed paper. We don’t need more of that, we need you to listen to us, the grassroots. That’s the whole point with a blog. And maybe Linder can show that he is actually able to listen to other sources than his liberal blog buddies. We are out here, are you reading?
No comments is fine, but more conversation would be valuable.
Update: Further evidence of the symbiotic relationship between PJ Just Nu and liberal bloggers today when PJ Anders Linder and Dick Erixon give each other a pat on the back, here and here.