Bloggers, not an alien race after all

Over at Daily Kos, Kagro X takes on an LA Times op-ed on bloggers chanllenging the assumption that bloggers didn't exist at some point.

But there never was a time when bloggers did not exist. Because -- again -- bloggers are not an alien race who fell from the heavens on a meteorite. They are people. And in fact, they are the very people for whom journalists have always been writing, and for whom they always will write. We have always been here, and we have always been a vital part -- perhaps the most vital part -- of the journalistic equation. You just didn't count us because you couldn't hear us.

Can you hear us now?

Good.

We were always talking to you. Always talking about you. Always had the exact same things to say about you and your reporting that we're saying now. We just lacked the technology to make you aware of it. Maybe you liked it that way. Maybe you'd rather it had stayed that way. But it didn't, and no amount of elitist scorn is going to change that, just as it was never able to contain it in the past. The "blogger's" disdain for shoddy reporting (and truthfully, sometimes even for quality reporting -- I have to acknowledge that) has always existed and likely always will. Blogs are just the most effective tool we've yet found to plug that disdain into.

No journalist who fails to grasp this will ever be able to write insightfully about blogs, bloggers or the blogosphere. It can't be done. You can write, of course. No one can stop you. But you can't be right. You can't be right about bloggers until you acknowledge who they actually are.