and what's more

Lord knows I don't want to revisit the blog vs journo yadda yet again. But Mr. BlindTangerineJones said something in a comment that merits a further something.

He said:

The real challenge for journalists--as opposed to news and content managers, which is not a job title self-respecting journalists generally wind up holding--is to tap into the ten gazillion bloggers writing about the ten gazillion things they saw with their own eyes that we didn't have a photographer at.

Which I will translate loosely to mean, blogs are best treated as primary sources - that can be used, as other primary sources are, by journos.

So, a blog can be a primary source.

Journalism is not primary, because it is mediated. It works on and with primary sources to produce something like news. When it works at all.

But journalism then turns to artifact. A real USian newspaper, like the one that I am subject to in my locality, will offer ads for glamorous $14.5 million homes on one side of a page. On the flip side: images of people coping with giant piles of garbage where they live.

The artifact, the journalistic object, is not journalism, though it might claim to "contain" it. The artifact has itself become a primary source that can be reflectively analyzed by, well, blogeurs among others.

So there's the play (I refuse to say dialectic). Journos use blogs, but because they (institutional media) are part of a corporate for-profit production process geared to popular consumption, their work enters the fabric of consumer artifice, phantasmagoric desire, and in turn become the subject of a new dimension of reflection via blogs. Then of course Journos can write about that.

Note: it is no longer the "content" of journalism that is the subject, once journalism has been tranformed into an object of reflection. (That would simply be public affairs blogging, which is by and large a minor subset of discursive onanism, as BTJ suggests.) No, it is journalism now taking on the status of primary source within an analytical or reflective mode in which it will be explored as everything but what it purports to be, i.e., a representation of reality.

This restless exchange, in which each mode, blog/journo, in turn exists first as primary source for, then as discourse mediated by, the other might have something to do with the evident inability to close off the question of their uneasy relationship, regardless of valiant efforts to do so.