Once again I've found myself defending journalism against its most ardent critics - journalists.
I was at City University's School of Journalism to present the main findings of the Science Media Centre report on the future of science in the media. Not for the first time I sat next to brilliant science reporters who insisted that any old blogger could do what they do and that the blogosphere is teaming with people reporting, investigating and telling truth to power as well as, if not better than, journalism does.
Despite the fact that most of the panel and almost the entire audience were against me, I'm not buying it. I know I always sound like some ancient Luddite in this discussion (tips on how to sound modern while criticising the blogosphere on a postcard, please - oops, sorry! - posted on my blog), but I think there is a difference between journalism and blogging. And dismissing that distinction when journalism is under threat is not clever.
Don't get me wrong, I love blogs - both as writer and reader. My life is hugely enriched by the daily updates from my own favourite bloggers, but they are not engaged in journalism. Most blogs are self-consciously the strongly held views of opinionated people about their chosen topics.
In fact, that's precisely the beauty of them. In the old days, if the Guardian or Telegraph rejected our rantings, the world would probably never hear them. Now we have created our own medium to get our brilliant insights out there. And of course some blogs may be true, and some may even nod to objectivity and balance, but the blogosphere would be a sadly diminished place if every view expressed had to be balanced, fact-checked, sub-edited and all those other peculiarities of good journalism. In other words, blogs work to a separate set of rules.
The irony is that it's often fans of the blogosphere who end up balking at its extremes and calling for new ways to regulate the web or separate out responsible, accurate blogs from the irresponsible ones - a major preoccupation for those who care about science or public health.
But these calls take us full circle, to why we need something called journalism - perhaps now more than ever. Regulating and policing the blogosphere would kill everything that is good about it. We should simply accept that there is the blogosphere, and there is journalism, and the more sound and fury on the blogosphere, the more need for journalism to do its job - to select, verify, correct, edit, analyse, balance and all those old-fashioned things that journalists are trained to do.
The debate reminded me of the excitement a few years ago about 'citizen journalists'. In the same way that journalists now rush to transfer their job title to anyone with a blog, so ordinary people caught up in often terrible news events - like the 7 July bombings and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes became 'citizen journalists'.
But there was a fly in the ointment: with seven or eight 'citizen journalists' reporting on the De Menezes shooting, there were seven or eight conflicting accounts. Some of the 'journalists' saw him walking calmly; others saw him running; and one saw him jumping over the ticket barrier. It was left to real journalists to weigh up these different accounts and find other sources to verify the conflicting stories. Thanks to new media, people caught up in these events can transform and enrich journalism in new and exciting ways, but that does not make them journalists
The fact that people can now communicate loads of interesting and important facts and opinions directly to the public is fantastic. In our report for government, we found scientists using blogs in ways that will enhance the public's understanding of and engagement with science. But they are not journalists and, to the journalist in my audience who says that what we call all this stuff doesn't matter, I say words do matter - especially words that denote an entire trade built up around a set of norms.
