Good to see you here! Yes, it’s true that a lot of people don’t like to receive criticism of their work – especially if it is from relatively anonymous sources.

But, as I think you’re suggesting, blogs are actually one way of gatherng feedback from our readers. And if journalists can’t take criticism, you’ve got to wonder why they’re allowed to give it out quite so much!

Because that way you may actually have to face some criticism on the ‘original’ stuff.

For one, there’s the whole shifting nature of competition. In print, it was usually seen as a “them or us” situation – you just didn’t acknowledge the existence of your competitor. This mindset carries over into online. “Why should I send traffic to another site? They need to stay here.”

Which, in itself, opens up another factor – the “sticky site” concept that was so prevalent in online publishing thinking less than half a decade ago, before it slowly dawned on most people that the link economy was producing more traffic than closed sites…

There’s a whole mess of work to be done in unpicking the thinking that’s rooted in the characteristics of print, from the basics of good journalism.