The Rise And Fall

Back in 2004 I had just barely started following blogs when Powerline (with some help from the Freepers) helped break the "Rathergate" story. I was not following them closely at the time, so I missed the initial story and a follow up that turned out to be the beginning of a long, often contentious relationship. That is the relationship between the Minnesota Center Right Blogosphere and Nick Coleman. It was a love/hate relationship that lead to many classic rants. I've written about them all before, so I won't go into all of that here.

Well on Monday we found out that we won't have Nick Coleman, Metro Columnist, to kick around any more.

According to a buyout memo released this afternoon and newsroom sources, Nick Coleman and Katherine Kersten will lose their columns, though they may be able to remain at the paper as reporters.

Now while everyone else has touched on how they will miss fisking Nick's columns (and even though he gave it up Mitch was king of fisking Nick's columns. The first thing I though of though was the irony of the fact that a medium that Nick (and many other "real" journalists) so despised is outlasting him! His nemesis at Powerline have not only outlasted him, but also grown in respect and political stature that Nick could only dream of during his days at Air America and the Star Tribune. It was the kind of recognition that we all dream of getting only these interlopers got it, not because they worked in the biz and paid their dues, but simply because they got (in Nick's mind) lucky. However, it was not luck as much as it was an open minded inquisitive nature that the "pros" seem to have lost during the course of the daily grind.

The meteoric rise of blogs (and concurrent fall of newspapers) should be a lesson to us all - newspapers and bloggers alike. It can happen to bloggers just as easily as it happened to newspapers. All it takes is for bloggers to get as detached from their readers as the newspapers have and to lose their passion for whatever drives them to post.