By Taylor Long

With the ever-growing popularity of blogs, conventional (and conglomerate) sources of information are under attack, confronted by this grass-roots movement of sorts, pushing to put more power in the hands of the average citizen. As a result, the credibility of blogs has been under scrutiny, and lawmakers, news reporters and others have posed an interesting question-should bloggers be considered journalists?

Webster’s New Millennium, simply defines a blogger as “a person who keeps a blog.” Blog, however, has a handful of definitions, from “a Web site in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in a reverse chronological order” to “A personal Web site that provides updated headlines and news articles of other sites.

Journalism is “the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media or the public press.” This definition helps as much as it confuses. Does supplying links to news stories count as collecting news, or does collecting news only mean finding it on your own? If it means the latter, this takes most blogs out of the running (though not all), but it also could mean that when a paper prints a story fresh off of the AP wire, that’s not really journalism. However, going by the definition, all columns and editorials would not be journalism, which is something a few people might be willing to butt heads over.

The definition of media is just as frustrating – “a means of mass communication,” which would count the Internet but the second part brings us full circle: “the group of journalists and others who constitute the communications industry and profession.”

Just as in newspapers and magazines, each author has a different technique. Some point to stories, while others do original reporting, commentary or satire. Some blogs are simply put to personal use.

Another problem is anonymity. While any journalism professor or major publication will tell you to avoid anonymous sources many blogs, such as Manhattan media & gossip hound Gawker.com, break stories thanks to anonymous tips. It allowed Wonkette (Gawker Media’s Washington D.C. base) to publish an interview with a nicknamed 26-year-old Republican staffer who anonymously posted about her sexual encounters with officials, including a married man on the Bush Administrative team in 2004. It wasn’t long before Wonkette readers figured out that the woman was Jessica Cutler, later offered a book deal and a spread in Playboy. Cutler told the Washington Post, “Everyone should have a blog. It’s the most democratic thing ever.”

It is reported that there were 27.2 million blogs a of Feb. 6. In a recent article in London’s Financial Times, New York Observer Senior Editor Choire Sicha was quoted as saying, “The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds.”

Now thanks to the abundance of blogs that cover highly specific topics, blogging is more of a threat to niche publications than large news organizations.

The acceptance of bloggers as journalists would most likely open doors that would allow them to do the type of in-depth reporting that most currently lack. So for now, most blogs will likely remain in the op-ed column category. But in a society where the occurrence of constant change is the only thing that doesn’t change, anything is possible.