Yes, I'll hold

Yesterday on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette fame (and now of time.com) said this:

Bloggers really are kind of parasitic on the actual reporting that many mainstream media outlets do. Let's face it, reporting is very expensive, it's very time consuming. It's not something that has immediate rewards. And blogging for all the good things that it can do, the kind of collective intelligence can bring to analysis, isn't -- isn't the kind of medium that really sustains any kind of thoughtful investigation.

Bloggers indeed are not known for doing original reporting, and instead commonly link to mainstream news outlets as their sources -- and, as commonly, to other bloggers.

Why is this? Does anything prevent bloggers from, to paraphrase Nicholas Lemann, calling powerful people on the phone and asking them blunt and impertinent questions, then reporting the responses? And would we all benefit if bloggers habitually did? Probably, though the change would come at the expense of newspaper journalists like yours truly.

But the fact is, it's not particularly fun to call powerful people and ask them blunt and impertinent questions. It can be downright uncomfortable, actually, though it gets easier with practice. It's a skill, really, and it helps make journalists journalists.