Are Mainstream Blogs Boring? Are Amateur Ones Irresponsible?

Hidden deep in a corner of the Hechinger Institute’s impossible-to-navigate website, there’s a Liz Willen piece called The Promise and Pitfalls of Blogs on the Education Beat that goes a long way towards explaining the reasons -- both concrete and cultural(?) -- why only a handful of newspapers have education blogs so far.

One key issue that’s not really addressed in Willen's piece is the challenge of finding the right person to run a new blog, in or out of the newsroom. A recent CNET article called Newspapers woo bloggers with mixed results raises that issue, and several others:

"While papers such as the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman are using blogs to give readers a news voice they never had before," states the CNET article, "other papers like the Washington Post are struggling with everything from charges of plagiarism in their blogs to being labeled with the word every editor dreads--boring."