Blogging with a purpose: Who cares what I have to say?

What do I have to say? And, most importantly, why should you read anything I write?
I had the same questions. As a full-time journalist for more than 25 years, I’m accustomed to interviewing people, covering government meetings and making phone calls so I can regurgitate facts accompanied by carefully quoted opinion about how those facts are going to affect readers.
Stay neutral, remain unbiased, avoid any semblance of favoritism. That’s always been the journalist’s mantra -- until recently.
Suddenly, journalists not only allowed to have opinions, but are encouraged to express them publicly.
It’s like opening the floodgates, tearing down the Berlin Wall, ripping through that miasma of objectivity that’s prevented us from telling all that we really know in the guise of fairness.
I’m not timid about expressing my opinion. My journalistic integrity, however, has kept me on a short leash in the public realm.
But now there’s this thing called a blog, an abbreviation for Web log, representative of random thoughts about sundry topics designed to evoke equally random responses from Web surfers.
Eleven years ago, there were about 50 blogs on the Internet. Today there are more than 10 million blogs. The blogosphere is inundated with everything from political commentary attracting half a million visitors a day and having untold influence on American public opinion to inexpert opines that appear to be more self-promoting than elucidating.
That’s just one of the reasons for the decline of newspapers and the high unemployment rate of journalists.
They’ve been replaced by citizen journalists and user-generated content providers who can do the job for free.
Well … they COULD do the job. Except most don’t want to make the effort to sit through boring meetings, wade through reams of boring documents, makes tons of phone calls and interview tons of people to get both sides of the story and then go out of their way to make sure the story is well-written, interesting, factual and, most importantly, credible.
As a result, the public is subjected to endless streams of blogs posted by self-professed authorities on various subjects. We find fiction presented as fact, propaganda passing for information and self-serving punditry qualifying as legitimate truth.
People aren’t sure where to turn for fair, unbiased information in this digital age. The public doesn’t have any guarantee that it’s getting facts or even half truths from the Internet. After all, who is holding the blogger accountable?
In this era when we’re bombarded with information from computers, cell phones and iPods, a generation of self-proclaimed experts have established themselves as bloggers and twits with forums that provide them with legitimacy despite the fact that they have no credentials.
Frankly, I don’t care to read the uninformed opinion of some stranger who managed to save up $800 to buy a computer. If I must blog, I’m either going to provide thought-provoking commentary or I'm going to stick to the principles of journalism and provide information that will allow readers to form their own opinions.
OK, I might take a stab at being entertaining as well.