I don’t think USA Today’s Andrew Kantor* really gets blogs at all. His argument seems to be that bloggers blow things out of proportion because they don’t have editors and most are not professional journalists.
Kantor misses the point. Decisions about which stories deserve a lot of attention are necessarily subjective. In the blogosphere these decisions are made democratically, not by an editor. Some stories the blogosphere picks up may look “blown out of proportion” to most “professional” journalists. But to bloggers, they’re important stories that merit more scrutiny.
Some bloggers are professional journalists, but others are professionals in other fields who can bring their expertise to bear on the news of the day in a way that professional journalists can’t. And as LGF’s Charles Johnson points out in his response, Kantor’s pro principles and editorial process didn’t prevent him from getting some basic facts wrong and omitting some others.
* CORRECTION: As Andrew Kantor points out in his response to Charles Johnson’s response, I misspelled his name in this post. It’s Kantor with a “K”, not a “C”. My apologies. I know it can be annoying, as it’s happened to me once or twice.