Are bloggers journalists?

I was glad to see that The Billings Gazette reprinted Alex Jones' piece in the Los Angeles Times about blogging vs. journalism. The column isn't on the Gazette website, apparently, but you can work your way to it by starting with Jay Rosen's excellent discussion.

Just two observations:
1. The blogging world bubbles over with contempt for conventional journalism, routinely challenging reporters' competence, integrity and even patriotism. But when a journalist mildly fires back, some bloggers go nuts.

2. Bloggers often mistake contempt from mainstream reporters for the last gasps of a dying, obsolete and elitist breed. Some of that may be fair, but there's at least one other reason for it. Reporters as a species always have carried around buckets of contempt for those who sit around critiquing the work of others instead of burning shoe leather and phone lines: editorial page editors, the copy desk, bureaucrats, academics, thumb-sucking think-piece writers of all sorts. It's a working-class mentality that dates back to the days when reporters were hired off the street and changed jobs as often as they emptied the fifths of whiskey in their desks. To working reporters, most bloggers are just parasites riding on the backs of those who do the real work. Until more real reporting goes on in the blogosphere, that attitude probably won't change.