The light at the end of the newspaper's tunnel

Phil Boas, the deputy editorial page editor for The Arizona Republic wrote Engaged bloggers are voracious newspaper readers, too. It's customary for anyone writing to the uninitiated about blogs to define them. This is a journalism trade publication and you are no ordinary reader, so I'll spare you the customary definition. Instead, I'll define blogs as they relate to you. They are your Nemesis in the making.

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 engaged reader in the world of cylinder presses and snail mail was much more manageable than the engaged reader in a wired world. Newspaper reporters and editors got their first glimpse of this not from bloggers, but from readers responding by e-mail. Where once you could duke it out with a reader on the phone over the facts of a story or slant of a column, you now do so with pause when that reader is on e-mail. You've learned from experience that the e-mailing readers can turn around and send every word of your dust up to the mayor, the governor, the competing newspaper, and your publisher.

That reader is now his own publisher. If that was disconcerting before, it is ever more so with blogs.

The Volokh Conspiracy blogged A really nice column on the how the MSM needs bloggers and vice versa. Whenever I blog about blogging, I often get an email insisting that bloggers need the MSM and are no replacement for it. I agree with this and this column, written to legacy journalists by a journalist, describes the symbiotic relationship between the MSM and blogging as succinctly as I have seen.

Ideoblog blogged Randy Barnett writes on the symbiosis between the MSM and bloggers, quoting a piece in the Arizona Republic. Bloggers add value to the MSM by commenting and correcting mistakes. I agree. There's an analogy in my paper on the Law and Economics of Blogging that I think usefully illustrates this point. I suggest that there is a

long-term equilibrium in the relationship between blogging and the mainstream media. Bloggers can be analogized to remora fish, who clean parasites from host fish such as sharks. The remora get food, and the sharks are healthier.

In addition to this item, which is interesting by itself, is the fact that I did not read it in The Arizona Republic. Rather I read it in http://www.findarticles.com/ which says it has 5,000,000 articles - not found on any other search engine. This is a reference source that I was unaware of before, but which is now in my Bag of Tricks, and which I anticipate I will be using more frequently in the future.

I did not search for this article. Rather I found it by reading a post on The Volokh Conspiracy who found it from Little Green Footballs who found it from a commentator on Roger L. Simon. I could have found it that way, since I frequently read Little Green Footballs and occasionally read Roger L. Simon, but in this case I found it by reading Ideoblog.