Here's one dead-paper journalist who's confident that both her crowd and their inverted-magnet colleagues could learn quite a bit from the indefatigable blogosphere:
I'm not an expert on blogging, but I am a fan. As a regular visitor to a dozen or so news and opinion blogs, I'm riveted by the implications for my profession. Bloggers are making life interesting for reluctant mainstreamers like myself and for the public, whose access to information until now has been relatively controlled by traditional media.I say "reluctant mainstreamer" because what I once loved about journalism went missing some time ago and seems to have resurfaced as the driving force of the blogosphere: a high-spirited, irreverent, swashbuckling, lances-to-the-ready assault on the status quo. While mainstream journalists are tucked inside their newsroom cubicles deciphering management's latest "tidy desk" memo, bloggers are building bonfires and handing out virtual leaflets along America's Information Highway.
[...]
The best bloggers, who are generous in linking to one another -- alien behavior to journalists accustomed to careerist, shark-tank newsrooms -- are like smart, hip gunslingers come to make trouble for the local good ol' boys. The heat they pack includes an arsenal of intellectual artillery, crisp prose, sharp insights and a gimlet eye for mainstream media's flaws.
Well said, Madam - and, witnessing her own kind's gradual supercession as the media instruments of first response and final thought, her words are borne on humility. She even kept her online column philosophically contradistinguished, pleasantly free of hyperlinks.
UPDATE: A brief, after-read, moment of devil's advocate (unusual for me). Might the hobby-like, for-the-love-of-it nature of today's blogging be the reason for such an inexplicably fraternal community - that if it ever became lucrative, serious bloggers would grow triangular dorsal fins? Perhaps not: hyperlinking is the purest form of flattery, deference and fair representation - and it's what many have recognized as the hallmark of internet commentary.