I’ve just read an incredibly clueless essay by someone claiming to be sharing useful information about making the personal/professional move from print to online journalism, or something like that.  It’s such a garbled explanation and the writer embarasses himself in so many ways that I can’t believe it’s written by a "Web producer for the New York Times" who "will write about Web publishing technology for OJR".

OJR is the Online Journalism Review.  They’re supposed to know what’s up.

So why am I writing this here?  OJR makes you register to comment including requiring your location, date of birth and other information requests that are overly intrusive for online comment systems.  This was the second time I started the process and ditched it.  It wouldn’t have been hard to do, it was simply insulting.  That may not make sense to old media minds but any new media head will understand.

The geeks among you can go decide if it’s a worthwhile essay or not.  The bloggers among you may scratch your heads at this paragraph:

In the process of writing this article, I once again logged in to my typepad account to see if it could be simple enough to let me get started blogging while I planned my next move. I considered other options, even myspace and friendster pages if that was what I needed to start writing. I finally decided I could get a very basic typepad configuration implemented in a couple of weeks that will require minimal maintenance and let me write while I plan my next move.

Would you trust someone like this with your online media anything?