You know my opinion of "citizen journalists" aka bloggers, and I think you're guilty of selective perception or selective memory when you gush that they 'have, in many cases, been doing a much better job that the "news industry" has'. That's pretty much the blind-pig truffle thing, that with millions of people spouting off daily, somebody will get something right and that's what you'll remember. I tend to agree with Hazinski in saying of the blogosphere that "it really isn't journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse."

That isn't to say that I'd support government regulation of journalism. It's hard to think of an idea that does more to threaten freedom of speech and transparency in government. True faith in the value of free speech leads me to say that anyone who wants to call himself a journalist is a journalist, and only a successful suit for libel or slander can say otherwise. I'm not sure that govt regulation was what Hazinski was prescribing, though--that part of his essay was strangely ambiguous for a journalist, and he might have been talking only about voluntary trade and professional organizations.

Reading the article as a lament without a practical prescription nevertheless got me thinking about a positive outcome. Today's professional journalism organizations could evolve into "certifiers" of news, applying their formal vetting procedures to news from CJs, much as Underwriter's Labs and Consumer Reports provide independent assurance in the hardgoods marketplaces. It's a natural for organizations already geared up to aggregate news, edit it and present it, and with existing staffs of researchers and their own reporters. An organization that's less about its own journalism and more about evaluating a large flow of information would be in a better position to detect manipulation of the news, too, possibly automatically picking up a pattern of the same story showing up in a network know to be associated with, say, the RNC Directorate of Blogging.

But today, do I think self-styled "citizen-journalists" do a better job than the professionals? Hell no, the blogosphere's an incoherent mob of propagandists and gasbags, with only the tiniest handful of people doing something remotely resembling actual journalism. That's too slender a reed by far to declare professional journalism dead.