Can a blogger also be a journalist?

Can a blogger also be a journalist? The answer appears to be: It depends who you ask.

At the fall conference of the Oregon chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists, I shared a panel with two former newspaper managing editors. Like many traditional reporters, their disdain for blogging was thinly veiled.

Since the topic of the panel was purportedly the future of journalism, and my panelists represented the end of the biz seeing the sharpest declines, I found myself using bloggers as an example of the hope for journalism's future.

My view is that blogging is just another method of publishing content, like printing a paper or broadcasting a newscast. The transformational power of blogging is that it is so easy that anyone can now be published. No wonder traditional print editors hate it. For decades, those who controlled the printing presses controlled the definition of what was news. Blogging gives publishing to the masses.

But as Steve Engelberg, managing editor of ProPublica, noted at the SPJ conference, the American revolutionary pamphleteers were the "bloggers" of their time, finding a grass roots way to publish views excluded from the official state press.

This issue stopped being academic in Oregon recently, where a local blogger was denied access to closed-door meetings because the city deemed him to not be a member of the "press". The blogger, on Loaded Orygun, argued that he shouldn't be denied press status merely because he did not work for some large media organization. Not surprisingly, in an Oregonian editorial, Bob Caldwell worried about who would hold an individual blogger accountable for journalistic misdeeds, the implied promise being that no reporter for a mainstream news organization would violate the principles of journalism. (Does anyone else immediately think of NY Times plagiarist Jayson Blair?)

In German last year, a blogger was named journalist of the year. It seems clear to me that some bloggers are engaged in journalism and others are not, and it is the content that they create, not the backing of a media monolith or the 'publishing platform' used that should define them. Professor Jack Balkin suggests exactly this kind of practical test for bloggers as journalists.

A post in Media Shift documented the continued blurring of the lines between bloggers and journalists. Although it clearly torments some traditional print reporters, a number of new voices have emerged thanks to the blogosphere, voices that were not previously heard when a few dominant media companies did most of the talking in their local markets.

Some of these blogging voices are original, knowledgeable, and add to the conversation as watchdogs and protectors of the public trust. That sounds like journalism to me. What do you think?