Crashing the blogosphere's party

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dan_kennedy/2007/11/blogosphere_party.html

If Daily Kos had been as influential in 2002 and 2003 as it is today, then there's a good chance Knight Ridder's reporting would not have been instantly forgotten. Daily Kos is not a substitute for the traditional media - it's a supplement, and, at its best, it and other blogs and websites function as an alternative echo chamber that plucks stories out of obscurity and lifts them to prominence.

Nearly three years ago the new media guru Jay Rosen declared: "Bloggers vs Journalists is Over." As it turned out, Rosen wasn't even close. Bloggers-versus-journalists is still with us just as surely as Bill Murray will have to get up tomorrow and take another stab at tracking down Punxsutawney Phil. Indeed, following Moulitsas's talk at BU, much of the afternoon was given over to traditional-media types who groused about bloggers and the loss of standards.

But bloggers-versus-journalists should be over. These days, they're part of the same media ecology. Personally, I don't want to start reading Daily Kos instead of the New York Times. But if the Times is screwing up, I want to know that Kos and others are going to raise hell.

Blogworld isn't an alternative to journalism, but it has made journalism better. That's at least as important.

perhaps if they had been more concerned about loss of standards when they decided to stop practicing investigative journalism in exchange for kissing the chimp's butt, just perhaps they wouldn't have so much to worry about.

standards... hah! You mean like the 'standards' used in the 2000 coup? Or the standards used during the run-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq?

In either case, any self-respecting journalist should be ashamed of themselves for having allowed the worst admin in US history to go along largely unquestioned.