Maybe we can discuss the journalistic integrity of particular A-List bloggers but I doub’t your average blogger is trying to be journalist or publisher. I think what’s really going on is that when some doofus with strong opinions gets a million hits a day and gets profiled in Wired magazine or Red Herring, the journalists start crapping there pants and start ranting, ironically, on there blogs.

Your average blogger starts a blog out of curiosity or pressure. What’s facitanating is what happens when you give a blogger an audience. Everything changes. First a few timid posts, then a few comments, then a bunch of posts…. Then appologies for not posting!? Ah, the birth of a blogger. Then the pressure builds and here come the google ads and some donnation buttons … bloggers learn as they go and the act of blogging changes the blogger. Blogging isn’t journalism - its anarchy.

Take John Dvorak of PCMAG - he’s a well-conneted, witty, well-spoken, fairly intelligent blogger that gets paid well to write a weekly column. He’s been blogging years before it was called blogging. My question is what’s the future of paid journalism? What’s the future of PCMAG?

I don’t think that we compare like with like though. Bloggers get irate when they are tared and feathered with the same brush. Obviously though we’re not all raving mad lunatics.

The same goes for journalists though. The death of mainstream media isn’t coming anytime soon and there’s a lot of journalists out there doing a good job.

The problem I have with the discussion about whether or not bloggers are journalists is that it’s too ill-defined, both in regard to journalists and bloggers.

There are, according to Technorati, around 24 million blogs at this point in time.. the writing involved is varied - in subject, content and quality. From analysis to polemicists and pamphleteers, to fiction, to fantasy, to what some describe as human aggregators of news, to personal diaries… of course 99% don’t take the time to analyse anything.

I can only speak for myself when it comes to blogging, I’d be a fool to do otherwise, I try to select reliable sources of information, fact-check it as much as possible against other outlets or archived news and then place that information into the context of other events. Ocassionally I’ll add more analysis, but I prefer to draw attention to links in other stories and other information that’s already out there and allow the reader to make the connection.. that’s just the way I do it. Then I open what I’ve written to the criticism of others.

Some journalists, in contrast, and even with editorial oversight, prefer to simply report, as fact, what their, often anonymous, sources tell them.

The point is they’re different beasts.

There’s too wide and varied a field, in both sections of the media, to directly compare in the manner you’re attempting, IMHO.

Btw.. I happen to agree that rushing to post on a breaking story can lead to problems.. but on a blog that post can be continually updated, corrected and refined.. unlike certain print journalists for example.

Michele - I think that you’ve got too much of a focus on tech journalism, rather than journalism as a whole. Most journalists will take the time to shift through PR rather than just reprinting it.