The Toronto Star’s David Olive has written one of those MSM-vs-the-Internet stories. His thesis is this:

A funny thing happened on the way to blogosphere dominance of the global conversation. Many of the most prominent bloggers have hitched their wagons to the traditional MSM.

As evidence of bloggers desperately hammering on the doors of trad media, he then cites:

1) Peggy Noonan
2) me
3) David Frum

Well, Peggy isn’t a blogger: She has a website that reprints her dead-tree writings. Likewise, yours truly – although my fitful postings here might qualify me as a dilettante blogger. David also blogs on a group website, but usually in 600-word essay form that conveniently surfaces as his print column a couple of days later. But none of us could be described as a creature of the web: We’re old-media guys trying to adapt to changing circumstances. I hang a shingle on the Internet mainly because these days for a writer not to have a website is like not having pants: It makes it difficult to get out in the world. But the idea that our feet in both camps is evidence of the fading of the blogosphere is eccentric, to say the least.

Mr. Olive writes:

You won’t stumble across the website of blogger Mark Steyn (left) at the dentist’s office, as you will Chatelaine [a Canadian women’s magazine].

And that’s a great business model if you want to be read by folks six months later and ten minutes before root-canal surgery. By the way, Mr. Olive gets the “stumble-upon” factor completely backwards: By definition, every successful blog was first “stumbled upon.” And, while you don’t (yet) see a lot of surfing at the dentist’s office, at coffee shops and other outlets you now see an awful lot of laptops and Blackberries — and fewer and fewer newspapers.