Powerline has reprinted the best piece on the relationship of blogging to newspapers I’ve read yet. Here’s a taste of what Phil Boas had to say:
Here’s what newspaper editors and writers should know about this new Internet phenomenon. Bloggers don’t have much respect for you. You are the “legacy media,” the MSM. You’re the Roman Catholic Church to their Martin Luther and his new high-speed cable modem. To Hugh Hewitt (hughhewitt.com), the blogosphere’s 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. The newspaper industry has known for a long time that eventually wood pulp would give way to microprocessors. That long-awaited paradigm shift now seems imminent. We may very soon be predominately an electronic medium and that has many print executives on edge.
…
We are headed to the Web in a big way and our readers, especially our most engaged readers – the bloggers – are going with us. They are giving us a taste now of what our new environment will be like. They will challenge and cajole us to confront our biases and our mistakes. And if we don’t confront them, they’ll clean our clocks.
That’s just a taste – you should read the whole thing.
