A blogged statement by one Jeff Jarvis has attracted attention among members of the National Conference of Editorial Writers in recent days. Jarvis argues that newspaper editorializing should be abandoned in an age of plentiful opinion.

The premise reflects the deterioration of vocabulary. “Editorial” is not any old opinion, whether stated in a letter to the editor or shouted by a street evangelist. An editorial, in its purest sense, is an institutional opinion, representing the views of the owner or investors – people willing each day to stand behind the leadership of the editorial page even at the risk of attracting the ire of the community and putting their investment at risk.

This characteristic of an institutional voice constitutes part of the ties that bind a newspaper to its community, whether that community is a city, a state or a nation.

An editorial, by definition, is considered, weighed, crafted, edited, discussed. Its tone and content signal that the institution has a point of view, a philosophy about its relationship with its readers and their community.

Editors and publishers, and the editorial boards that act in their name, make an effort to achieve consistency over time. The best editorial pages are rooted in a coherent set of values, thus offering the community a voice, among all other voices, that can be relied on as a touchstone.

Jarvis faults editorials for being unsigned. The criticism would not be unexpected from one who considers an editorial merely another person’s outburst of opinion. Of course editorials are unsigned. An institutional opinion with a byline is an oxymoron.

And it is true that editors often do no fresh reporting. Some editors follow the philosophy that the editorial should be a logic-driven outgrowth from known facts. Others, of course, are frustrated by the lack of detail they get from the news side and thus break news on their own. Both approaches have their merits.

Critics of editorial pages who have never gone inside an editorial page office, perhaps including Jarvis, toss off our function as “telling people how to think.” I have never heard an editorial writer claim to be doing that. We try to bring facts and arguments to the fore, based on our institutional platform and the fact that our sole occupation is (or should be) thinking and writing. It is a misstatement, as others in the NCEW discussion have noted, that we exist to trumpet our own opinion and stifle or disrespect all others.

I have deep personal concerns about what seems to be inattention, among some editorial pages, to sound thinking and clear writing. If we are losing readers, it’s not because of an insufficient amount of white space or display type but rather because of an insufficient percentage of intelligent, stylishly-stated text in our institutional opinions. Such inadequacies as pointing out the obvious, vacillating and understating (or overstating) the point of view have never attracted respect, and they aren’t about to start.

But this is a matter entirely separate from the utterances of the folks who want us to believe that blogging is the new journalism. In a nutshell, editorial writers speak for institutions; a blogger speaks only for herself. Her online opinion is indistinguishable, in substance, from a shout in the crowd, and the posts proclaiming agreement no different from other shouts in the crowd.

Certainly shouts in the crowd can affect the course of events, and there’s a danger that they may crowd editorial-writing from the stage – unless the practitioners of the craft elevate editorial-page writing and thinking. We also need to pay attention to the evolving expectations of the public in an era of technological change.

But as a potential replacement, blogging is an imperfect candidate. A blog entry is no more an editorial than is graffiti. Few editorial pages would stoop to the caricaturing of a target and then attacking the caricature. But that’s what happened here. Jarvis’ attempts to force a comparison, so that the one might replace the other, are rooted in unbounded misrepresentation.