Yeah, well I worry more about everything written in the mainstream media that is "based loosely, if at all, on facts" -- no to mention a whole lot of editorial opinion and supposition masquerading as fact.  This is much more pernicious than anything happening in the blogosphere because people are still inclined to believe that the factual reporting in the mainstream media is worthy of credibility.   Mostly, it isn't.  Clean up your own act.

I gradually stopped reading TPM when they brought Steve Benen aboard, who seemed to favor the easy cheapshots I'd expect out of Daily Kos.  I don't know where they found him, but his posts as thoughtful as I had come to expect of TPM.

I feel sort of guilty about that, because Marshall and most of his team really are excellent.  Is Benen still around?  (Am I even getting his name right?)

Marshall's not a blogger. A blogger bloviates; Marshall does original reporting and does it well. On top of which, he hires and pays people to do original reporting; further, he and his professional journalist staff do the most arduous and intense kind of reporting there is: investigations of official corruption. In fact, Marshall is taking up the heavy journalistic lifting that so many newspapers and media outlets have abandoned,a nd figured out a way to do so profitably.

It would clarify matters if we could revert to using the old professional designation "reporter." Good journalism is based on solid reporting: investigating leads, verifying or replacing hunches, gathering and sifting through facts in order to fairly establish a legitimate story angle etc etc.

Reporting is to blogging as writing novels is to updating a MySpace profile, or maybe text-messaging

For you, Tep: www.usatoday.com/.../2007-01-24-textmessagenovel_x.htm

Go Josh Marshall! Now that's a serious blogger/journalist.

Wish he would do a bit more blogging though...I know it's quality, not quantity, but I wish he were more prolific!

The challenge with blogging is that the low entry cost means that anyone can get their words out there. So, yes, we have to distinguish between reporters and bloggers.

But, even with newspapers, there have always been rags. Somehow, people, for the most part, became aware of which ones to give more credence, too.

I do think that in an attempt to compete with the popularity of online activity, newspapers have given up journalist quality. Who to trust for journalistic integrity has become more and more difficult to figure out.

I suppose we should be glad, then, to have independent award systems that can help point us in the right direction.

Tep is right: reporting is the key. And the sad fact is that there is a media-wide crisis of declining reporting that has nothing to do with blogs or the internets. Why is TV news so crappy? The almost total lack of reporting. Why are newspapers declining in quality? Less reporting. What distinguishes the crap being served up by the NY Times op-ed page these days from the great opinion journalism of yesteryear? Lack of reporting.

Now, I would also suggest that we need new terms of art to differentiate "blogs" that engage in reportorial journalism from at least two classes of "blogs" that do not, the personal-journal blog and the mass-entertainment blog. But the existence of non-reported blogs is not a problem for journalism. The march-to-extinction of original reporting in non-internet journalism is the problem.

thanks, rat, saw the NYT article on same. Hilarious.

Rhubarbs, agreed, the dearth is stunning. This is a very serious problem that will bite us in the arse.

It started with shutting down foreign bureaus, accelerated with the decline of investigative reporting, and now it's extending to basic reporting as well. In a country where ignorance was already staggeringly high, the shutting down of each of these windows into the political, economic, cultural-social worlds beyond the goldfish bowl of the average citizen is a big problem for a democracy.

I used to think otherwise, was a partisan of the brave new citizen-journo world, Go Blogs! rah rah, but after several years of unending noise, blather, groupthink, smirks'n'sneers and unadulterated horseshit, I said goodbye to all that.

The noise-to-signal ratio of the blogosphere is astronomical, and search engines don't help. It wasn't supposed to be like this. A thousand niches doesn't work either, because that way leads to ever more-narrow tribes.

Never thought I'd say this but gatekeepers are good. Mass media that can aggregate memes and help moderate, educate and lead opinion is a good thing as well. I suspect the huge increase in audience share for NPR (now up to 30 million!) over the last 10 years or so is a reflection of the deep need of a democracy for quality mass media and professional gatekeepers.