I often hear the argument that only journalists from large organisations are capable of putting in the time and effort to research long stories (and this is the part where it is apparently mandatory to mention the Watergate investigation), and that bloggers don’t have the time, resources and skills to do this.

And then I look around and see what is actually produced by professional journalists and by bloggers.

While there is certainly a lot of vacuous crap produced by bloggers, it doesn’t seem to occur in any greater proportion than by professional journalists.

From this “analysis,” it appears that the basic thesis—that only journalists from large organisations are capable of putting in the time and effort to research long stories, and that bloggers don’t have the time, resources and skills to do this—gets it the wrong way around.

Instead of producing original stories, investigations and in-depth stories, the large media organisations employing professional journalists seem almost exclusively to output recycled stories from other outlets, or reprinted press releases.

Bloggers, on the other hand, were producing almost exclusively original stories, usually based on in-depth analysis which had taken multiple days to produce.

Of course, not all bloggers do this, and the large media organisations do, of course, still break stories based on their own in-depth investigation.

But the days of the large media organisations being the only source of in-depth, professional-quality and critical analysis are gone.

One thing to notice about the bloggers I follow: almost all of them do their writing as a “labour of love;” they have a “real job” to pay the bills, and their blog is something they write because it interests them, not because it is their primary source of income.