It’s not really a red rag to a bull, more a spinnaker in a field of Spanish fighting bovines. Joseph Rago (note the name) has a total pop at the blogocracy in today’s Wall Street Journal, and boy does he land some heft.

“Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.”

First into the ring to challenge raging Rago is former heavyweight champ, Duncan Riley, a blog evangelist of some years standing, but now reduced to a small outpost somewhere in Western Australia. I won’t quote Duncan because a lot of it is unprintable in a family publication like Syntagma.

What Rago is doing is to lament the “passing” — or imminent demise — of the words-on-paper publication. He believes the editorial expertise and fact-checking that underpins print media is being shredded by the instantaneous hullaballoo of the blog form.

He’s right on that, of course, but in the process he’s tarring everyone with a large, but broadly insignificant, brush. If anyone wants a considered, fact checked, intelligent opinion on events, they wouldn’t necessarily turn to blogs. They would probably still buy one of the weekly current affairs magazines, or read the op-ed pieces in the Times or indeed, the WSJ, possibly online. But there are blog-like alternatives emerging now.

In the world of “blogs” you can get finely written and expert articles on most topics if you know where to find them. At the higher end, blogs are not like newspapers, they are more like authored, opinion columns in newspapers, where a single, authoritative voice expounds on a topic of the moment. That the piece is self-edited is the real distinction. The voice is more able to be itself. If it’s a good one, that’s a real plus.

But this type of column is not really a blog in the commonly understood way. Bob Cringely’s weekly piece over at PBS.org, for example, is more a part of the mainstream than the blogosphere. Online content platforms shouldn’t all be rubbed with the ashes of MySpace. The top end is converging with the mainstream and morphing into it as papers and magazines get digital and learn the tricks of the trade from online journalists and technologists.

There’s no either/or here. Why should there be? Let’s welcome the craft of print to the internet, not forgetting its wealth, and develop our own native pixelcraft to help the mergers along. That’s happening already.

Ultimately, in any field, only 5% succeed, and they can usually do the job anywhere. Blog “culture” will quickly be submerged by the need to present top quality content to a discerning readership, as printed pamphlets were replaced by organized newspapers in the 17th/18th centuries. As more people read online, so will online content reach out to meet them.

Rago and Riley are opposite poles of the debate. As always, the future lies somewhere in between.