“Imagine a fairly drunk housewife stuck in front of CNN, growing hornier as the day wears on. The Wonkette reads like a diary of that day,” is how Matthew Klam of The New York Times Magazine describes one of the most widely read policy blogs in this week’s cover story.

The catchiness or the sluttishness of Wonkette aside, blogs are now highly visible, influential (apparently James P. Rubin, John Kerry’s foreign-policy adviser, begins and ends each day by trawling through blogs), and seemingly everywhere. While blogs have some critics lamenting the demise of journalistic integrity, a large number of political blogs are both effective and popular precisely because they are explicitly partisan. Only a handful of people make their living blogging (Nick Denton, who owns both blogs and a porn site, leads the pack); freed from the pressure and obligations of generating advertisement revenues and increasing traffic to their sites, almost all blogs are fueled by passion, personal commitment, and, if we are to believe the NYT Magazine article, terrifying amounts of caffeine.  

The popularity and effectiveness of blogs, however, does not sound the death knell of more traditional forms of journalism. Avid blogger and former editor of The New Republic Andrew Sullivan writes in this week’s Time magazine:

Blogs depend on the journalistic resources of big media to do the bulk of reporting and analysis. What blogs do is provide the best scrutiny of big media imaginable — ratcheting up the standards of the professionals, adding new voices, new perspectives and new facts every minute. The genius lies not so much in the bloggers themselves but in the transparent system they have created. In an era of polarized debate, the truth has never been more available.

The democratization of journalism need not be synonymous with the watering down of credibility, whatever that problematic term may mean. Indeed, with fabulists like Jayson Blair, formerly of the NYT, and Stephen Glass, formerly of The New Republic, the efficacy of the current system of internal editorial oversight at major media organizations has been called into question. While individual blogs are not held to uniform standards of accuracy or non-partisanship, the community of bloggers and their readers functions as a team of driven, curious, and personally invested fact-checkers for both the high-profile and overlooked stories.  

Mimi Hanaoka