I take your point that you never said blogs would eliminate older news media. I recall exactly what I had in mind when I wrote that ‘relax’ line - I was trying to find some middle ground because I felt I was beating up on Skube. I tried to pull my punch and ended up saying something that rubbed you the wrong way for good reason. I apologize.

Rethinking it through what I believe is actually present on the blogosphere is a kind of triumphalism that inappropriately big notes the blogosphere rather than a full blown replacement thesis. And yes I acknowledge I implied that you held that position when that was not the case. As a concrete example of what I do think exists I’d point to Skube’s quote from Daily Kos enjoining us “to avoid the right-wing acronym MSM.” It implied, after all, that bloggers were on the fringe. “we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we’re selling.” Similarly, the right side of the blogosphere too easily dismisses the MSM. This attitude, which I think it is now clear neither of us share, is why I find Riepl interesting. He looked directly at issues of replacement and I think I should address that in another post.

And thanks for the encouragement at the beginning of your comment. Its good to know you were engaged by the broader points put forward.

That taxonomy of blogs is also really helpful.

About apples vs. oranges. It was Skube who decided to take the apples and the oranges and group them together in a column about “blogs,” without almost no reference to actual blogs, which would have crashed his categories. My reply was specifically to that. I wanted to establish that he didn’t know what he was talking about, and that the Los Angeles Times didn’t care if he did. Some of those blogs that did reporting were in fact some of the sites that peddle opinion– apples that turned into oranges.

Only one part of this rubbed me the wrong way. “So I would say to both Skube and Rosen - relax - blogs are going to change newspapers (and TV) but they are not going to eliminate them.”

I never said blogs would eliminate older news media; I think the idea that they would or could is absurd on its face, and I have spent a lot of pixels establishing that almost no one believes this. I have also come out publicly for a hyrbid form–pro-am journalism–that proceeds directly from the assumption of what you call “convergence.” (Do a Google search on that term.)

In fact it’s extremely hard to find any quotes or links that would identify a serious believer in the elimination or replacement thesis. What you find is endless debunking of that view, a great many observers doing what you did– playing the realist or the sage and doubting that blogs will replace the professional news media while telling other people to chill out.