There is something joyful about the serendipity of trackbacks and stats. They are a great way to keep track of the debate, discover new voices and remind you of old ones.

I checked my stats today I someone had come back my way via a trackback comment I left on a post over at Andrew Grant Adamson’s Wordblog.

Andrew’s post was a really useful roundup of the what to teach journalism students debate, that flared up a while back – still worth a read.
There had been a few more comments after my trackback, which included a peach of one by Alan Hiscock, a University Lecturer at Westminster in the UK

It starts:

It brings a wry smile to my face to see how much of this tosh about the new media comes from US sources. Journalism in the US has never had much in common with that in the UK; and that is still the case, both in print and on-line. The all-round quality is much higher in the UK.

You know where this is going don’t you. But just in case:

In all the main places where jobs in journalism are advertised in the UK, there are still vastly more print jobs than those in the new media.

Only three publishing companies in the UK have so far made significant money out of web-sites.

Most web-sites show an appalling ignorance of typography and have little opportunity to make it more refined. The result is that column measures, founts and typefaces, not to mention the inordinate length of some stories, mitigate against the reader persevering with or enjoying the experience.

Which three? And column measures and founts are, in a sense, redundent terms in web-design, unless you want to enage with stylesheets.

Now the main thrust of the comment is anti-blog which Hiscock equates to columns.

Columns and blogs are high in opinion, mainly cock-eyed opinion, but low on facts; and that’s not the journalism I have come to love and practise for 38 years.

In fact, they are not just worthless in a journalistic sense…

What’s more, I work hard in a committed way to do a first-class job. Those who have the time to blog can’t have much of a life nor a demanding job.

So, blogs are crap and unprofessional. That’s his opinion. A “mainly cock-eyed opinion”, but everyone’s allowed an opinion.

The thing that I’m surprised at most is that someone who professes to be ‘no dinosaur’ can, in the current climate (and the comment is only a month or so old) still see a distinction between print and ‘new-media’ and still labour under such an obvious print bias.

Still, spending all this time blogging, what do I know.