There’s also a tactical reason for the established media to be worried. If today we shrug off a ban on blogging as something peripheral, tomorrow we invite egregious official attention to, say, comments posted on newspaper and TV news websites. Silly but supremely self-confident home ministry bureaucrats may ask why a newspaper is hyper-linked repeatedly in an ‘offensive’ blog. At a time the nation is gravely threatened why are those guys reading you so much is a government query that would drive most editors of the established media apoplectic, especially since most of them look at the internet as a revenue and readership accelerator. Journalists’ jobs are not in danger because of what bloggers write. But a journalist’s job is defined in part by a blogger’s rights.

Now, why do I say blogging can’t replace old-fashioned journalism? One simple reason: it takes money, resources, an establishment, training and editors (who act as gatekeepers) to gather and present news. Blogs don’t have the infrastructure for newsgathering. If a blog did, it would be a newspaper, not a blog. This is the error cool guys like Reynolds and Murdoch make. When serial blasts hit Mumbai, could one blogger, however brilliant, tell you what happened? Could he also tell you what was happening in Israel the same day? The form in which news is presented may change. But the organisational character of newsgathering can’t.

By its very nature, news needs lots of people to produce it and those people need the backing of money. It is terribly fashionable to say these days that young people get all their news from blogs. It is also terribly wrong to say so. Young people can get their daily news fix from blogs because blogs have the established media to get the news from. Just because the odd blogger breaks news sometimes or because blogs can catch a journalist cutting corners — keep that up, bloggers — doesn’t change this basic economic fact.

... contd.