Donalds Designated Driver has a great post up over at All Kinds of Time in regards to something that appeared in this mornings Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Basically, DDD wants the guys who cover the Packers for accredited news organizations to stop writing like bloggers, with a sharpened note for Tom Silverstein:

Rather then play to their strengths, "journalists" are impersonating bloggers. Silverstein: leave the blogging to those unqualified to do your job. I don't need you to weave your narrative into each story. Neutrality and accuracy are the fundamentals of journalism.

It's an excellent point and one I'm (obviously) interested in. In Silverstein's defense, I think most journalists in general but sports jurnos in particular, have so many writing responsibilities (am I doing a blog post? A feature? A game-day wrap-up? A 'Notes' section? A human-interest puff piece?)  that they sometimes loose track of the vehicle they're writing for at any particular time. The phrase that DDD objects to would be fine if it was written on the Journal Sentinel's Packer blog - but it wasn't, it was written as a feature news story, which puts me in full agreement with DDD. But Silverstein may have written it originally as a blog-post and then expanded it into a news story, forgetting that the commentary was included. (I doubt it, but it's possible)

Overall, DDD draws attention to a trend I think we'll see more and more of - our favorite Packer news outlets cross-pollinating their news-coverage with blog-like writing. You can see this in Greg Bedard's news articles - they are much more informal and conversational than, say, Bob McGinn's, but no less informative or revealing of the news of the day. (Yesterdays A.J. Hawk story and his piece on Brandon Jackson are perfect examples of this) And as much as I agree with the overall thrust of DDD's post, he probably realizes this battle was lost a long time ago, about the time 'News' organizations started giving us stories about missing white girls on a 24 hour cycle and stopped telling us what was going on in the rest of the world. Too big a jump from DDD's post? I don't think so, but hey, that's just me.