“Increasingly the distinction between the blogosphere and the mainstream media is becoming fainter and fainter, such that it has already reached the point of irrelevance.”

This is a totally ridiculous statement. There is such a major difference it’s unreal and incredibly frustrating when bloggers act like there is not. I am a reporter, and if I happen to find a story or a hint of one on a blog, that is just the start of the process and 100% of the time a lot of work has to go into it to make it into a real story for the paper. In blogs, details are missing, there is no real reaction from the community, rarely any decent photos and the vast majority of the stories are swallowed up by comment from the blogger. To say this is journalism is a joke.

Journalists train for at least four months to get the basic skills for court and council reporting and interviewing, along with the essentials of Law and government knowledge. Then it’s 18 months of doing the job before you can truly say you are competent at it. To say a guy on a computer pointing out something he saw whilst out on a walk is the same as journalism is, quite frankly, an insult to all the journalists who work so hard and put in such long hours to make sure the job they are doing is done well.