The rise of blogs in the late 1990s brought amateurs into the realm of professional journalism. It was an awkward meeting. As National Press Club president Doug Harbrecht said to conservative blogger Matt Drudge in 1998 while introducing him to the press club’s members, “There aren’t many in this hallowed room who consider you a journalist. Real journalists … pride themselves on getting it first and right; they get to the bottom of the story, they bend over backwards to get the other side. Journalism means being painstakingly thorough, even-handed, and fair.”⁴⁸ Harbrecht’s suggestion, of course, was that untrained bloggers weren’t as scrupulous as professionally trained journalists. In the following decade, though, as blogs like Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, AndrewSullivan.com, and Talking Points Memo gained credibility and a large readership, traditional journalism slowly began to try blogging, allowing some reporters to write a blog in addition to their regular newspaper, television, or radio work. Some newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times even hired journalists to blog exclusively for their Web sites.

By 2005, the wary relationship between journalism and blogging began to change. Blogging became less a journalistic sideline and more a viable main feature. Established journalists left major news organizations to begin new careers in the blogosphere. For example, in 2007 top journalists John Harris and Jim VandeHei left the Washington Post to launch Politico.com, a national blog (and, secondarily, a local newspaper) about Capitol Hill politics. Another breakthrough moment occurred when the Talking Points Memo blog, headed by Joshua Micah Marshall, won a George Polk Award for legal reporting in 2008. From Marshall’s point of view, “I think of us as journalists; the medium we work in is blogging. We have kind of broken free of the model of discrete articles that have a beginning and end. Instead, there are an ongoing series of dispatches.”⁴⁹ Still, what distinguishes such “dispatches” and the best online work from so many opinion blogs is the reliance on old-fashioned journalism—calling on reporters to interview people as sources, look at documents, and find evidence to support the story.