In this view, the writer’s job is not to share insight or perform acts of journalism or entertainment, but more a kind of PR filtration duty for a specified “community”. The process of turning industry news into blog posts even has its own quasi-formal language: engaging and sufficiently stripped of marketing to be readable–with a hint of snark to establish that all-important critical distance!–but punctilious in its servicing of reader expectations.
Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing’s analysis of a controversy over the tone and content of gadget blogs… and let’s just say that what he wrote might not only apply to gadgets…