By Jay Rosen

There's a revolution out there in media access. The key words in this upheaval are blogosphere and legacy media or old media. It used to be that when a citizen got steamed about something, a friend would say, "Write a letter to the editor." Sometimes the citizen did, and sometimes the letter was printed, but the point of saying, "Write a letter," was to remind the one with a grievance that there are ways to speak out.

Today you might tell your friend, "Hey, start a weblog." And anyone with an Internet connection and a grievance can do just that. A weblog, or blog for short, is just a personal page on the Web that is easily updated.

Having a blog is sort of like having your own column. And blogs have become extremely popular. There are 3 million of them on all subjects. Lately, the political bloggers have entered the news in a big way.

Conservative blogs — some with 5,000 readers, others with 100,000 or more — helped in the recent knockdown of Dan Rather, one of the pillars of what some bloggers call the legacy media. Rather and company eventually had to apologize for a "60 Minutes" report on President Bush's military service that was apparently based on phony documents.

CBS had sworn to the legitimacy of the documents. But the bloggers had their doubts. As more and more of them examined the memos on the Internet, the vetting that was supposed to have been done at CBS was being done in the blogosphere. Any Web-savvy news intern would have seen the proof disintegrating online. But the network's powers that be seemed oblivious. The day after Rather broadcast the piece, his story was in trouble.

"I had serious suspicions about the authenticity of the documents on the morning after they were aired," said Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post, who began to check into the experts CBS had relied on. From there, the story unraveled. Bloggers kept the pressure on and other news organizations took a closer look.

Blogs have corrected a power imbalance that had given the citizen with a grievance few options beyond "vote the bums out" and "write a letter." Journalists have gotten used to a world where consumers of the news have choices. Now there's a new choice: Become a producer of news yourself, one of the checks and balances on big media.

Jay Rosen is chairman of the Journalism Department at New York University and author of PressThink.org, a weblog.

No: 'Old media' remains the standard-bearer of principled journalism

By Al Tompkins

It is good news that the public is so disappointed with CBS' handling of now-questionable military service memos. The outcry says that the public still cares about the quality of so-called "old media," which I define to mean newspapers, TV stations and broadcast networks. When a Web site not affiliated with a newspaper or network prints a rumor that turns out to be wrong, we have come to dismiss such things as the fleas that come with the dog. You expect more from old-media newsrooms. And you should. Our recent history has been filled with nearly heroic acts of journalistic excellence.

The Miami Herald and the Associated Press independently investigated the Florida elections to learn whether we can trust our government to conduct an honest presidential election.

CBS News, the Washington Post and the New Yorker reported the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison. Soon after the stories emerged, a Chicago Tribune poll found that half of all Americans favored restraints on the reporting of the prison abuse. Great media organizations act independently from public pressure, favoring the free flow of information instead.

The Boston Globe fearlessly investigated the scandal of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests. Thousands of victims came forward. A cardinal, six bishops and three archbishops resigned.

Old-media journalists risk their lives to see with their own eyes what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than a dozen have been killed.

Old-media journalists in the Darfur region of Sudan provide firsthand accounts about the horrors of ethnic cleansing. Last week, old-media journalists waded through the putrid floodwaters of Haiti to document more than 1,000 deaths.

The best things old media do are extensive and expensive. It is work that produces more light than heat.

Old-media journalism is vital to a democracy when it observes, verifies, provides context, offers analysis, clarifies, explains and appropriately comforts or alarms us. Journalists do not pander to or protect a secret special interest. Responsible news organizations provide many truths, not just those truths that serve their interests.

Without those principles, it doesn't much matter who is talking, writing or blogging. You can't trust it and it ain't worth spit.