It's an evolution

I'm a blogger. All I had to do was sign up for an account, and learn how to use a keyboard. That's really the only qualification necessary. That's all you have to do to spit venom across the world wide web. I can reach a world wide audience with no credentials. But it's not my fault that's just the way the world works now.
To reach a world wide audience twenty or even ten years ago, you had to get a journalism degree. Or become a broadcast major, and minor in journalism. You had to learn ethics, and ethics in journalism. To report on something, you actually had to go to the event.
I can understand why professional writers take offense to the blog-o-sphere. Because we don't have to go anywhere. We can sit in our underwear, click on a you tube video and report on any event in the world that we want to. Even if we're doing so from a location nowhere near the actual story. We don't have to do any legwork that we don't want to do.
If another blog, or a commercial web-news site has done the work for us, we can just link to it. We don't even give them credit sometimes.
If you ask anybody over 50 years of age how they get their news they will tell you they read all about it in the morning paper. Anyone under 40 is basically 80% Internet, and the ages between are some mix of Internet TV and newspaper. I understand why professional writers despise Internet writers. Because we're diminishing their medium. We're a bunch of crack-shot amatures who occasionally through nostalgia and dumb luck reach larger audiences than they ever will, even though they happen to be a 15 year veteran of a very popular national publication.
It is because of blogs, that all newspapers will cease to exist in x amount of time. I say ten years, and they're done. By that time, even older people will have made the switch to at least Television, and probably toward the Internet.
I say good riddance. But I say it in the nicest way possible. Those professionals will have to find a way to co-habituate the blog-o-sphere or stand in an unemployment line. Every time there is a new idea in society there are people who are against it, because humans are creatures of habit. If you're used to sipping your coffee and flipping through the morning paper, you don't want to sip your coffee in front of a computer screen.
What does this cultural switch mean for humanity though? If you count on the Internet to get your news, are you really getting it from reputable sources? I have never broke a news story on this blog, because I am not a journalist. But there are bloggers out there who actually think they are a barer of news. Even though they don't understand the responsibilities that being a barer of news carries. And for better or for worse people are reading them more vigorously than they ever read a news paper. Possibly because of the sheer volume of entries that they can read from any one specific blogger. Bloggers are not competing for a limited amount of space, like professionals in news rooms do. When you have a blog, "every thing's in" every hiccup. You're the editor after all, and you love yourself.
This may be un-self serving because I am a blogger myself, but I dread the day when all there will be to read about any subject casually (without buying a text book) will be blogs. There are many blogs that I read, and I'm always looking for new ones, but I always keep these things in mind.

A) Who is this person? What do they stand for?
B) How good is the writing? Is it really that captivating? Or am I just attracted to the color scheme?
C) How did they get this information? Do they really know about the thing they're talking about?
D) Could I be getting this story another way? Is this the only place this information exists?

For the most part I don't read "news blogs" because of these reasons. Nobody who blogs about "current events or headline news" actually went there, or actually knows anything more than a major news network has told them.
And I think that's the exact reason that I like the kinds of blogs that I do read. They're real people writing about the real things that they know about. The things that happen to them, and how that makes or breaks them as an individual. When people drift too far from themselves or from themselves interacting with their own specific reality (be it a political rant, or social concern) I tend to change the channel.
Which is why I think that blogs are getting a bad rap in the professional media. Because professional writers, fail to distinguish between personal blogs, and agenda news driven blogs. A personal blog, deals with the person and their life. And if there are topical issues of debate or "news" that come up in a personal blog, then the reader can easily make the distinction in their head that this is not "news" it's mere speculation by an author they like. Which I think has a valid place not only on the Internet but in society.
Which is why I think there is a place for those professional writers and also a place for us johnny come bloggers. Because it's their job to give perspective on things greater than themselves. But not out of spite, or out of anything, other than their editor. They have a budget, and press pass, and those things still mean something. They're not stuck in their basement all day, they're out there risking things, sometimes even their own life. To give us an unbiased review of what their own two eyeballs have seen.
Let's leave the news to the professionals. And let's keep writing about ourselves. At least for me that's what I'm here for. Is for you. You know; I'm interested in you. Keep it up.