Wendi Dunlap, girl reporter, or Google, the Great Leveller

Slumberland » TBT Towing speaks out:

Last week I wrote a post here about predatory towing, which referred to the business practices of TBT Towing, as reported in the P-I.

I’m not poking fun, as I hope you’ll see.

Local weblogger Wendi Dunlap posted some comments about some really crummy tactics used by local towing companies, essentially staking out locations at closing time in order to tow cars without giving the owners an opportunity to drive away. It seems the GM of one of the companies did a little Googling for his company’s name in response to a news story about it and didn’t like what he saw.

You can read it all at the linked post. What I found interesting was that the towing guy was treating a weblog he found in Google’s results as a a news organization on par with the Seattle P-I. He seemed to think he had the attention of the editor/publisher of a newspaper (and in a sense, he did). I’m inclined to be charitable to someone who engages in a dialog, even if I don’t agree with all their facts.

This is part of the hype about weblogs, the whole notion of everyman’s printing press. But this is the first time I have seen a weblog treated as part of the press this way.

<updated> mispelled name of our heroine fixed: sorry about that