I wonder ... Is this constant need to feed the blog and receive feedback journalism or just gossip? Will journalists start skewing their coverage to please the masses? We've already seen what the result is when something like that happens (the run-up to the Iraq war).

Blogs are interesting and fun (I'm hooked on Slog). I just wonder how long the craze will last.

How do y'all keep focused on writing your regular features with all the blog posts? Seems like it would be difficult to juggle blogging and the other work that must go into putting a newspaper together. Or maybe you're all just smarter and more efficient than I am.

Does The Stranger offer those bonus blogging payments mentioned in Carr's story to keep you around and happy?

I'm a reporter in Fargo, and my personal blog is so wildly different than my columns. It's strange when people from my readership stumble across it. I talk about queer stuff a lot and that would never fly with the Forum.

As far as a newspaper-sponsored blog, I could get one, but I feel like I'd be trounced for my opinions in this conservative wasteland. Maybe that's why I should do it. Hm. A new year calls for new goals...

What bothers me about the piecemeal, frenetic nature of news-oriented blogs is that they tend to replace research with simple observation, and so what could be a reflective piece of big-picture cognition instead emerges as a scattering of impressionistic reactions. You've got a good example further down this very page: Angela Valdez reporting a complaint about school district employees. Later it emerges that the instigator is a crank and this yet another in an endless series of similar trivial and mostly meritless complaints.

Now, kudos to Valdez for picking up the phone to do a little fact-checking and get a verification/refutation of this story. That's the difference between journalism and rumor-monging, and is what I would expect of Slog (or any blog with journalistic roots or aspirations). But shouldn't that simple effort have been made before the piece was posted in the first place? (And the original post still has no update referring to the later one). What is the urgency that demands this be posted without any basic fact-checking? Has the need to post anything that crosses your desk or mind completely overwhelmed journalistic responsibility? Or is the loosening of the tyranny of limited pages and column-inches simply made you too giddy with freedom? Should we just have lower expectations for journalism on the internet -- and especially for blogs, even when they are produced by nominal journalists as an adjunct to something that aspires to being a news source (at least in part, at least some of the time)?

I don't mean to pick on Valdez or this story in particular; trucks on sidewalks at schools is clearly not all that important either way. As a story for the paper version of the Stranger, it would have died after that first phonecall -- just as I'm sure hundreds do every week -- and that's a good thing. I'm just concerned that by getting to see the sausage being made, as it were, we're at risk of falling into a gossip-mongering ourselves. It's not just the journalists who react to the constant feedback; it is the readers who then react to the reaction (in this case perhaps calling the school or just lowering our opinion of district workers). And when the reaction is to crank the newscycle ever tighter, with faster turnaround of information in ever-smaller quantities and ever-lower standards of verification, we all suffer.

Joe - I completely disagree with your analysis. I love the transparency of Slog - the good, the bad, and the ugly. When something may or may not be going on locally, I check here first. The response time on Slog beats all of the "regular media" hands down, as does the time to corrections, follow-up, etc.

Generally, I like the "dispatches from the front" feel of blogging, but so few news blogs use the immediacy of the medium to great effect. I think Slog does - and I think they could do an even better job of it if they wanted to devote some staff to it rather than sharing between the print edition and Slog.

But that's just one girl's opinion. :-)