• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, May 23, 2005

That cosmic crash you heard last Monday was the sound of a million egos collapsing when a new Pew/BuzzMetrics study failed to find inordinate agenda influence by bloggers in the 2004 presidential campaign. But research weenies that they are, the Pew folks gave bloggers reason to step back from the ledge by disclaiming: "This is exploratory research... I don't think we did anything but scratch the surface."

Nevertheless, the Pew study ought to stop (at least for a while) all the breast-beating about how important blogs have become. It's not like we didn't already know this. Try dropping the name of a big-league blogger on anybody not in the online industry, and you'll get back looks blanker than a Newsweek PR crisis management playbook.

In fact, eMarketer Inc. said recently that there is evidence that most U.S. Internet users don't know what a blog is. And that only 4 percent of major U.S. corporations have blogs available to the public for purposes such as corporate marketing, communications, or advertising.

This didn't sit well with PR-guy-turned-blog-advocate Steve Rubel, who wrote that all eMarketer did was "regurgitate a lot of existing numbers that are already out there." Steve's future income aside, Ezra Palmer, the research firm's editorial director, said: "The latest Pew data and other anecdotal evidence suggest that blog readership has crested, at least temporarily."

It could just be that folks are too filled up with news and opinions they get from elsewhere--that blogs are just one too many dishes on the info-smorgasbord. Isn't that why we read newspapers and watch TV news, so that somebody with some professional judgment can search through all the chaff and find the grains of wheat? With all the press screw-ups with which we are all now too familiar, I still tend to trust the AP over some guy who sits around all day banging out his thoughts--presumably for posterity (or bragging rights).

As much fun as it is to hit the press while they are down (and they seem to be down a lot in recent years), it is an extraordinarily hard job that I think is generally done well by mostly honorable people. You learn a lot about what really is news and what isn't when you have been doing it for decades, as have most reputable news organizations.

I think we would be poorly served as a nation were the primary news-gatherers to fall on such hard times that we had to count on bloggers for accuracy and fairness. We tend to undervalue the job that news organizations do, especially when they pull a Janet Cooke or Jayson Blair. But god help us if the Fourth Estate was not there to keep the other three (Kings, Lords, and Commons) in check, and keep us informed.

When bloggers start schlepping down to check the police blotter at 3 a.m. just to make sure the victim's name is spelled correctly, then they can pull up a chair to the adult table.