Excellent Editorial About Blogs By A Publishing Insider

I really liked this piece. The simple fact is, I'd be happy to read a newspaper if it was written by intelligent, honest people, instead of dimly-informed Grade-C intellects trying to push an agenda.

Lots of good stuff, here are a few nice paragraphs:

If you've remained nonplussed as they took down Dan Rather and four of his Black Rock colleagues, if you haven't the slightest interest in acquainting yourself with the blogosphere, don't move an inch. You won't have to. Bloggers will be knocking on your door any day now. Or knocking it down.

To many of you, bloggers are a presumptuous rabble-amateurs elbowing their way into the publishing world. You may not know them, but they know youyour face, your manners, your prejudices, your conceits.

They're your readers. And, God help us, they've become the one thing we've always begged them to become ...

Engaged.

...

The Power Line bloggers aren't journalists. They're attorneys whose pedigrees include Dartmouth, Stanford, and Harvard law. There is undeniable heft to their argument, so that to watch an exchange between the conservatives at Power Line and the lefty columnist at the Star Tribune is to watch an intellectual mismatch that is, frankly, embarrassing.

...

To Hugh Hewitt (hughhewitt.com), the blogospheres leading cheerleader and one of its most polished practitioners, you are Stalingrad in 1944. Your institutions are hollowed out and your walls are scorched.

But of course, Stalingrad held, didn't it? And that gets me to the second definition of bloggers.

They are your light in the tunnel.

...

They're already teaching us today how to own up to our mistakes. You don't stonewall, as Dan Rather did. You fess up immediately and with full transparency. There's a lot of garbage on the blogosphere, but there is a high tier where the product is superior and is drawing mass readership. On those blogs, correcting error is part of the culture.

It has to be, explains mystery novelist and screenwriter Roger L. Simon on his blog rogerlsimon.com. "Bloggers-at least those with sizable audiences -are subject to more editing and fact-checking than virtually any mainstream media journalist. . . . I have written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle-among others-and received nowhere near the amount of editing I get on here. I make a factual error on this blog, and I am often corrected within minutes."