Are citizen-journalists just amateurs?

Nicholas Lemann, in the current New Yorker, takes issue with many bloggers' conviction that they are doing the job the mainstream media are too complacent or arrogant to do. It's an entertaining piece, and in the online version you can of course visit the sites he mentions...and see what some blogger-journalists think of the article.

Comments

[Dan Goodman]

From what I've seen, bloggers are indeed doing work news-media pros ought to be doing. Figuring out that certain documents were forged, for example. Determining that a picture of peaceful downtown Baghdad on a political news site was actually taken from a particular Istanbul suburb. (If any professional reporters had looked at the site, they missed such subtle clues as the signs being in Turkish.)

Not as clear-cut: the professional news media saying that Joe Leiberman's problems in his primary campaign are because of his pro-war stance.

Which is not to say that the political bloggers get everything right. But when amateurs -- many of them more biased than the professionals -- outperform the pros, I would say there's something wrong with the job the pros are doing.