Robert Scoble, who is taking a well-earned break from blogging this week, passes along a article about about blogging from Wall Street Journal writer Peggy Noonan.
Noonan suggests blogging represents an ever-expanding frontier on fringes of the information age -- for a while -- anyway. Although some in the Mainstream conceive of blogging as the "Wild West", Noonan counters this argument with a well-reasoned logic.
It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web.
Noonan is a voice of sanity in the hype given to the blogosphere these days. For journalism educators, Noonan points out that blogging is a force to be integrated into how we train future journalists.
Someone is going to address the "bloggers are untrained journalists" question by looking at exactly what "training," what education in the art/science/craft/profression of journalism, the reporters and editors of the MSM have had in the past 60 years or so. It has seemed to me the best of them never went to J-school but bumped into journalism along the way--walked into a radio station or newspaper one day and found their calling. Bloggers signify a welcome return to that old style. In journalism you learn by doing, which is what a lot of bloggers are doing.