You may recall a post from a couple of weeks ago about an East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists panel discussion on blogging.

As promised, here are some excerpts. (And here's a full transcript for those of you who might be interested.) As someone who pretty much understands blogs and blogging, I found some of Jack McElroy's comments from the "other side" more interesting.

Excerpts after the jump...

On whether frustration with the media led to the explosion of blogs...

Betty Bean: Perhaps, but it's also the availability of technology and people think it's fun.

R. Neal: I was a little frustrated that I'd write letters to the editor but they'd never get printed, so I started publishing them myself and hoped someone might read them. Michael Silence asked me to explain blogging one time and I said it's letters to the editor without the letters or the editor. Betty is also right, that more people are spending more time on the internet, and they're looking for fresh content, new information, different perspective, inside info (Betty: It's like crack!) and blogs provide that.

Bob Stepno: Except for the crack part, that's right. It's fun to do, like putting on a show in the barn. Also frustrated journalists, such as two friends from the Hartford Courant who started an alternative paper, frustrated journalists can start an alternative media in an afternoon with a free piece of software. It's people with something to say and a place to say it.

Johnny Dobbins: Around the same time blogs started taking off there was the dot com bust, techies had to have somewhere to vent their frustration.

Jack McElroy: I came into the job just as blogs were taking off, and always wondered what it would be like to be an editor before blogging. That must have been the golden age, when you could get away with anything and nobody would call you on it. Now you get continuous feedback. I read Romenesko, a blog about the industry and is read by my peers. And at any given time Randy can catch me on something and everybody I care about can read about how I screwed up. Blogging has changed the business, not so much for me because there have been blogs since I've been an editor, but it has had an effect on a lot of things as far as credibility is concerned.

Dorothy Bowles (to Jack McElroy): Do you feel that blogs drive readers to your print edition?

Jack McElroy: I'm not sure. I think people who are actively engaged in public affairs online tend to be media consumers of a wide range and that they probably do read the newspaper a lot, so I think it helps our position in the community and it helps our contact with readers whether they are online or print. We are more and more viewing ourselves as not being too concerned about how people connect with us as long as there is a connection.

Glenn Reynolds: One thing bloggers hear from journalists is "why do you hate us so much", and of course it's not true, it's like the people in the baseball stadium yelling "you bums" at the players, but they bought the ticket and they're there. They're there because they like baseball. If they're complaining it's because they care. If they don't care about baseball, they're not in the stadium at all. They're off blogging about Gilmore Girls or something. And there's probably a whole subculture who bitch about how Gilmore Girls has gone downhill.

On site standards and moderation...

R. Neal: There are two different parts to that. There are the blog postings that show up on the front page like an article. Not many blogs have multiple... like in our case anybody can log in with a user ID and an email address and setup an account and start posting articles to the front page. So in that environment, we have to have some rules or it would get totally out of hand, as it did in the past few days. Around election time it gets a lot worse. (Betty: and probably right now!) Yeah, probably right now because they know I'm here and not watching... But, that's one difference. Some of the big blogs that have huge traffic, they just can't monitor the comments, that's the other part of it, the comments people make on articles, and anybody on most sites can logon and without even registering or giving an email and say whatever they want. At a big site like Atrios it's impossible for them to read those so they don't even try unless something's brought to their attention.

Glenn Reynolds: My site doesn't have comments. My feeling is... I've been blogging so long that when I started nobody had comments, and I just never added them, because I felt that if anything went on my site it was going to be associated with me, fairly or unfairly, and I didn't really want to have responsibility for policing the stuff. Because when you start policing stuff not only do you put a lot of time into it but also anything you let through you are responsible for. It probably doubles your site traffic to have comments, because it becomes like a chat room (R. Neal: we like to think of it as "community") but I've just never done it and I have to say there are times when I've regretted it, I'm technologically capable of having comments and I will occasionally open comments on a topic, but I very seldom regret not having them. There's a level up to which comments tend to be good and interesting with respectful conversation, but when you exceed a certain level it tends to become the equivalent of the old Usenet flame wars. After about fourteen or fifteen comments it has nothing to do with the original subject of the post.

On whether blogging is journalism, and the intersection of the two...

Bob Stepno: If someone is writing their own blog, and reporting facts, I'd call that journalism. If someone is writing their own blog and writing essays about things, I'd call that essay-ism. If they're just commenting on politics from the sidelines, I'd call that punditry. This is the most flexible media you can imagine.

Jack McElroy: News comes at us in a lot of different ways. I like to think of it as we are all swimming through a sea of media and throughout the day people receive messages and at the end of the day they're not even exactly sure where you got it all from. But, are we methodically perusing blogs? We are doing some of that, and monitoring some, but that's an almost infinite universe to explore. I do think blogs are great (for business). Didn't Drudge actually shake loose the Lewinsky story?

On blogging as a media watchdog...

Jack McElroy: We operate in a fishbowl now. The Dan Rather story is the poster child of that. The errors are being exposed, and it's been very positive in that regard. The general public perception of established or mainstream journalism has maybe never been lower. The polls show mistrust and credibility issues, and I think it's ironic that there were probably a lot of problems before that nobody ever knew about, so now that you're better and your problems are being aired your credibility goes down. I've got to believe that it's a good thing in the long run for the basic mission of journalism speaking truth. And if you think about freedom of the press in the broadest sense, as contributing to the democratic marketplace of ideas, then the more the merrier and the quicker we get to the truth.

On there being so many media sources of news and information it's hard to know who to trust...

Jack McElroy: Maybe when there was a limited number of media, you could view each evening newscast or morning newspaper as the truth. Of course, I'm not sure that was, and I think it's a dynamic flow that we never actually reach the absolute truth because we continue to have the scope revealed to us. So I don't know when you reach it and stop and say we've found it out.

On the university training citizen journalists...

R. Neal: Yeah, definitely. I talked to Bob about that one time about putting together a class project to write such a guide for citizen journalists. So absolutely I think that you would have a lot of interest in that. I think. At least there's one person interested in that.

Bob Stepno: We actually seek what people really want to know about. Every once in a while I put up something like a link to the EFF guide, the people's guide for bloggers, that has (advice for keeping yourself out of trouble). (There is a website by Poynter called News U) that offers short courses on (things like) a couple of hours on how to write better headlines. I see not only blog posts but e-mails where the headline or the subject line doesn't tell you what's in it and I just want to grab these people and say verb! You need a verb! But I don't know how many bloggers want to listen to that. [..]

R. Neal: As far as what kinds of things I think bloggers could use some help with, ethics is certainly one of the things, and standards of journalism. I don't think most of them want to be lectured to so much about writing (some of them probably need it). But things like how to work public records, what's available at the courthouse, who do you ask for what, what's there, what can you get to. A lot of people don't know that you can just go down and ask for property tax records and that sort of thing.

[Later in the conversation...]:

Jack McElroy: One thing I'm intrigued about is, in the instance of like Porkbusters, the idea of open source investigative reporting. I keep thinking maybe we should start some kind of experiment where () in our organization we say hey, everybody out there, we're going to investigate X, have at it, and see where it goes. It makes me nervous to think about, on the other hand I also think that could be pretty powerful.