Motor Trend Blogger takes a blow on bloggers, mainstream car-journalists and himself
While surfing the net, I stumbled upon an interesting post over at Jalopnik’s website referring to an article on Motor Trend Blog written by Todd Lassa. In a nutshell, Mr. Lassa began by commenting on the Mullaly – Bush incident (which to be honest, we haven’t followed but you can get an idea here & here) only to continue an excessive attack on bloggers and trained car-journalists working in mainstream media. My opinion? I hate generalizations. I agree that a significant number of bloggers base articles on rumours without checking them out first, but on the other hand, I know plenty of bloggers who put trained journalist to shame with their thoroughly checked and lightning-speed articles that pop-up when the news happens and not a month later when prep-school kids can do it with the same ease.
A few examples? Let’s take the Corvette Blue Devil and the BMW X6 that Mr. Lassa referred to. The NY Show BMW X6 rumour -not that we want to praise ourselves, but I assume he’s talking about our April Fools Day joke that was picked up by several blogs (and sites…), and as Mr Lassa noted, “trained journalists were chasing bloggers' stories that the BMW X6 would appear at that showâ€. True, however, there were bloggers like our Spanish pals over at Motorpasion who “managed†to see straight through us and as far as we know, they’re not trained car journalists.
As for the Corvette Blue-Devil, just for the record, while Motortend fell for WindingRoad’s December hoax, several car blogs –Carscoop included, didn’t. But how the heck should we know about these things, we’re just a couple of ignorant and arrogant “small-time bloggers†with no idea whatsoever about car-journalism... So as Mr. Lassa notes on his article, "from now on, if you want the real story, just come to this space (aka Motor Trend) and other websites of well-established news organizations". Yeah right...
Sources: Jalopnik & Motor Trend
UPDATE: See what others had to say about it: Autoblog.com , Worldcarfans
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