VITAMEDIAS
How blogging changed journalism - almost: Bloggers tend to form online cliques and pat one another on the back. Few of them have been able to keep up the same level of quality for long periods of time: If a thousand flowers bloom in the blogosphere, many wilt fairly quickly. And though bloggers don't claim to be objective, their personal obsessions can still become grating. For example, there's a large swath of the conservative blogosphere that seems almost entirely devoted to attacking The New York Times and especially columnist Paul Krugman, as if no other major newspaper or columnist deserved reproach.
Finally, there's the simple fact that while bloggers can be highly substantive and demonstrate considerable expertise - some of the best are career journalists or professors - they're very rarely thorough. Bloggers tend to specialize in putting a deft touch on pre-existing information rather than in generating completely new findings; there's no such thing as a blogging investigative report or feature story.
All of which suggests the complementary, rather than alternative, role of blogging with respect to mainstream media. The central virtue of blogging, I've decided, is that in the proverbial agora, or online marketplace of ideas, bloggers are like Socrates on speed.
They're constantly interrogating arguments and points of view, noting flaws, advancing more sound positions, and shifting the focus to new questions. The mainstream media are being watched more closely because of bloggers - and kept more honest - and that can't be a bad thing.
And it's fascinating to think of new directions that blogging may take. [...]
Finally, then, blogging is a modest revolution, one that we can now view with some perspective but that has not yet fully run its course.
The smartest words on the phenomenon, it seems to me, came from the USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro, a frequent blog reader. Shapiro was asked to comment on bloggers' Trent Lott triumph by the Boston Globe, and he had this to say: "Like every revolution, 'blogging' is overhyped on the way up, overscorned on the way down, and settles into the middle realm of reality."