What Exactly Is a Blog?

Re “A Private Room With a Narrow View” (May 30), about a reporter’s blog after looking around the room where the late jazz musician Hank Jones lived:

Your column left mostly unanswered several questions that really should be addressed before we go much further into the swamp of online “journalism.” It dealt with the standards of blogs, as though we all agreed on what a blog is and is not. I spent 45 years at The Providence Journal, and I still do not understand them. Nor do I like them.

Is a blog merely the private thoughts of the blogger, who has been given the privilege of saying what he happens to think at the moment without a qualified editor passing judgment on it for accuracy, taste, appropriateness and so on?

Or is a blog a short news story published online? Your column suggests that it is, and that it is edited by an editor like anything else approved for publication in the paper and must meet Times standards. If that is the case, why call it a blog (whatever that is supposed to mean)? Why not call it a news story? Must everything we do be a matter of clever marketing?

I think we would all benefit if we just dropped the word “blog” and went back to simply putting out the newspaper, which we used to know how to do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/opinion/06pubedletters.html?th=&adxnnl=1&emc=th&adxnnlx=1276016404-xvsaS+y3ewobFvy891KUsQ