Interesting article over at Online Journalism Review, where Robert Niles raises the question “Are ‘Blogs’ A Parasitic Medium?” At first blush — particularly for the technosphere — one might knee jerk and say “hell yes”. This blog certainly does its own fair share of blood sucking at the teat of mainstream media.

However, to think that blogs are like a horde of filthy ticks whose existence is dependent on mainstream media is a little much. At this point, I could argue and give examples of blogs that do report new, novel, and ground breaking stuff, because they have the “ins” that no journalist could.

But I’m not.

I’m going to take a different tack by saying that mainstream media is just as guilty of using the original investigative work of others to produce copy — and as such, are really no different than blogs.

All charges of quality aside (I’ll bring it off the backburner in a second), original reporting (i.e. “jouranlism”) is done in all kinds of media — whether it is radio, newspaper, television, or, dare I say it, the internets and even blogging. When a piece of news, regardless of its original source and medium appears, it tends to disseminate across time, space and communication mediums. And in this respect, I don’t think blogs are any more guilty of regurgit — I mean, interpreting, fact-checking, and otherwise opinion-giving, than any other kind of “news” medium. When Reuters breaks a story about a new piece of technology, for example, I can expect the very same bit of news on blogs.

But so what?

If its big enough, I can also expect the same bit of news hours, or more likely, days later, in other media. And to be frank, let’s bring the issue of quality back off the backburner for a second — I think that many bloggers do as a good a job, if not better, than some professional journalists when they’re working with the same kind of material. The issue of quality amongst blogs is NOT that the majority might sound like they might be the product of semi-literate hacks — but that a minority are actually quite good.

Blogs are a form of communication like any other, albeit a new one that has the potential (and some would argue is beginning to exercise that potential) to transform the face of how we all read and understand the news. Some blogs are crap, there’s no question. But on the other hand, didn’t someone say that 90% of *everything* is crap anyway?

If that’s the case, I would suggest that the crap quotient on similarly reported stories is certainly no higher than the mainstream media — and perhaps, is a percentage point or two even lower in some cases.