Have your say - but only if it's worth saying

“No-one’s interested in your views,” Richard Burton told Cardiff University’s wannabe journalists at this week’s lecture.

He did go on to clarify this with the caveat “unless you’re relevant,” but that’s exactly the point: who is relevant?

According to Burton, the kinds of people that bring something to his party range from the Daily Telegraph’s South Asia correspondent Peter Foster to Big Brother’s Chantelle.

Presumably he might also have cited fellow bloggers listed on his Blogroll, such as Roy Greenslade and Shane Richmond.

So, Iain Dale’s archetypal little guy may have been given a voice, but the real issue is: does he actually have anything to say with it?

“You must have a commodity – something to sell,” says Burton.

This idea echoes Bob Atkins’s comments about blog credibility: “Who are you to say want you’re saying?” he asked.

The point seems to be that what you are saying is only interesting if the podium from which you’re speaking is on a relevant stage.

Even newspaper columnists do not get off lightly and can't, apparently, assume that a loyal readership perhaps straddling the length and breadth of the country is justification in itself for airing their views via the medium of the blog.

In his Wordblog, Adam Grant-Adamson asks, "What is the purpose of newspaper blogs?", saying, "A blog by an opinion columnist always makes you wonder whether you are reading the bits that were not good enough to get into the paper."