Days after Mr. Lipton praised the S-R and offered some discussion on future developments, the S-R editorial board decides to take make a generalized broadside attack on bloggers.

The editorial hems and haws a little bit, qualifying it's criticism a bit by saying that some blogs are good and some can be town squares, but then in the final passages it really gets to the heart of the issue: bloggers aren't real journlists.

This rift, between the official "journalist" and the "blogger", shows a maddening misunderstanding of our entire project here. Have we done nothing to prove this wrong? Have we done nothing to show the way?

This editorial is bad. Of course blogging isn't traditional journalism, it isn't double fact-checked, you need to keep an open mind, sometimes factual stories meet with the fantastical and, like mythology or religion, might point to a deeper truth even though the facts remain unproved. But to attack bloggers in general because the S-R doesn't agree with or like some people's thoughts on Duncan seems misguided at best, and an angry stab at worst.

Doug Hughes/Spovegas
News Is A Conversation

DFO: Actually, I don't believe the author of the editorial was naive at all about blogging since he's blogged for the last 18 months and been a professional journalist for 35 years. Yeah, I wrote it. And I'll stand by the edit that bloggers can be good but few of them have the expertise, discipline and sense of balanced reporting of your average journalist. Bloggers play an important role in the new media. But they/we remain niche players at this point.

---

---