So you better pepper your effort with plenty of quotes and experts' opinions (one trouble - if they back a liberals' contention then automatically, for the conservatives, they become unacceptable as a scholarly source) but what the heck, if a lone blogger can put the city desk of (hypothetically) the Santa Monica Outlook to shame, after an airplane crashes in Mar Vista, then you can write an Oped piece and get a wonderful check for your effort with no problems.
What if "they" have infiltrated the ranks of management at the New York Times and "they" refuse to accept your efforts because "they" don't want to refute the assertion that bloggers will put them out of business some day soon.
Yes, bloggers will keep newspaper reporters "on their toes" by catching fact checking errors, and while they may occasionally scoop news organizations with a brief about a breaking story, a one man operation will never be able to outperform a team effort.
The freelance fact checking will not replace the criticism (it may augment it) done by folks such as the Columbia Review of Journalism, because the CRJ folks know much more about quality journalism than most bloggers and so the CRJ people will be able to criticize reporters job performances much more knowledgably than Joe the Blogger. One or two good gotcha examples of fact-checking don't make someone a journalism critic.
Ken Kesey wrote: "You get your visions through whatever gate you're granted."
Now, the disk jockey will have the Mills Brothers urge blogers to "be sure it's true when you say . . ." and we will do our imitation of the Cheshire Cat. Have a "Blogger scoops the New York Times!" type week.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
