Some bloggers are more brilliant and provide far more insight than others. This is the case with newspaper readers, too. The difference is that the Internet gives us all access to the best "readers" (as well as the worst, but we can ignore those).
Confusing a blogger with a journalist can be like confusing a football fan with a player. Hey, they're both wearing a jersey. They're both in the stadium. They both say "we" when talking about the team. As in sports, where some "fans" go pro and work as announcers, some bloggers go pro, too, and educate people with their knowledge and insight.
But even that is yet another stereotype that proves false in some cases. For example, many bloggers write about their own experiences, rather than about what has been reported in the press or on other blogs. And some of the better blogs do employ some skills and practices developed over the years by journalists. Some journalists become full-time bloggers, and some bloggers become full-time journalists, so there's a revolving door.
The main danger with the media misconstruing blogs as second-rate media is that they seek to compete with blogs and the attention and traffic they get by becoming deliberately second rate themselves.
The cable news channels, for example, have discovered that hiring someone full of opinions (and other things), and plunking him or her on the air to argue and agree with unpaid "pundits" is way cheaper than hiring reporters, researchers and mobile camera crews to go out into the world and actually do journalism. It's also, in their view, both blog-like and link bait. They want it both ways: They seek to sponge off the cheap, blog-like outrage and attention from the world of blogging and also feed off the credibility developed over the years by the professional media.
This is the wrong direction, and it's bad for everybody, especially the information consumer and the media themselves. Rather than frittering away too many of its resources on things blogs can do, the media should in general focus on things blogs can't do, such as investigative reporting, long-term beat following, real fact checking, the cultivation of sources, and the breaking of news.
The trail of links through the blogosphere usually terminates at stories produced by professional journalists. So if the media wants eyeballs, they'd probably get more of them by doing better journalism, not aping the sensibility of blogs.
And they should stop stereotyping bloggers. The truth is that every kind of person blogs. Some of them reflect insightfully on media reports. Some don't. And some even die of heart attacks.
But that doesn't say anything at all about the general state of bloggers or blogging. Bloggers are everybody, so stereotypes don't work. And if the media did a better job of editing and fact-checking, such stereotypes in the press would be far more rare.
Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. Contact Mike at mike.elgan@elgan.com or his blog, The Raw Feed.