Blogs and journalism

A couple posts worth linking to on this perpetually interesting topic:

Mark Cuban responds to the controversy over his Sharesleuth blog project: Responsible Journalism. He asks some good questions:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Nothing at all. The news, his news has to get paid for somehow , right ? But is he a responsible journalist ? Is he a responsible publisher ? Do we even know ?

Doesnt the foundation of responsible journalism come from transparency ?

And in two posts, Doc Searls gets to the meat of the matter on just what kind of journalism blogs can be. He responds to a newspaper column by Dr. Laura Schlesinger about blogs and their newsworthiness:

First, try to understand what blogs really are. There are over 50 million of them, and many are outstanding publications. Some are by first-rank professional journalists. Some report from war zones. Rather than attack and malign the whole category, look at bloggers as a resource. They can perform a useful and time-honored journalistic role, as stringers. Sources. Feet on the ground in Santa Barbara. A way to tap into the community and get good editorial at the same time. Hey, when citizen journalists are becoming more numerous and helpful every day, why not take advantage of them?

And he discusses reaction to his posting from Logan Airport the other day when he was one of the first to report on the security changes:

For what it's worth, I didn't think of myself as a reporter on the scene, even though, in a literal sense, I was. I thought of myself as a traveler blogging about being where news of some sort was going down, maybe. That's not journalism as I've been taught to think about it over the last 40 years I've been doing it. But in a literal sense it was journalism. I was, after all, writing in a journal.
So I think the real story here is a slo-mo one that will go on for years. It's the story of how journalism became a ordinary practice, rather than an exclusively professional one.