There is no such thing as a blogger

I caught wind of Simon Dumenco's column in Ad Age via BoingBoing. In it Simon poses that a blogger is just a writer using a different medium:

I've been thinking of what I am -- about what any media person in the digital age is -- since having coffee last week with a 30-something newspaper editor who bemoaned the fact that newspapers keep on setting up blogs as these separate, exotic add-ons to their Web sites, instead of integrating blogging into their usual newsgathering operations. There's simply no good reason to segregate the functions, he insisted.

And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing -- writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder. It's just software, people! The underlying creative/media function remains exactly the same.

This idea really resonates with me. We're all just writing. Some are better than others, of course. The difference, I suppose is that although some are more influential than others in the realm of the written word, this new(ish) medium allows for a greater degree of participation by the layman. Its ease of use also speeds up the rate at which content can be published, which may have an impact on the process itself:

In the very near future, there are only going to be two types of media people: those who can reliably work and publish (or broadcast) incredibly fast, and those ... who can’t.

Link (via BoingBoing)