Your article cuts to the center of a morass of feelings I have about blogger sites versus journalistic outlets like Salon. I used to experience dissonance when I read progressive blogsites that communicate information and function like any other journalistic organ, but then I would find the focus was narrower than the complete story.

I'm becoming more sophisticated and self-aware now about the expectations I bring with me when I read blogsites and when i read journalistic sites.

I go to bloggers to get riled up, inspired and informed in ways that fall outside of the reporter's mandate. What I read there is often designed to tune my interest in a particular agenda or project, and I suspend my cynicism because I believe in the agenda.

I use the journalists to vett the people, ideas and information I get from the bloggers, when they happen to talk about the same thing. Often, the range of information a journalist reports is greater than that of the partisan blogger, and therefore the picture of reality is bigger and more complete. And I trust that when I am reading negative things in a progressive journalistic outlet like Salon, they are (usually) real and not a rightwing hack job, which at this point is what I reflexively conclude about MSM reporting. I need to know the good and the bad to make informed decisions.

We need progressive journalists and we need a progressive political netroots, but they just aren't the same.

Keep up the good work Joan.

Matt Stoller over at MYDD posted this about what the role should be:

Here are four basic duties of a campaign blogger or netroots specialist.

Smear patrol: Your chief responsibility is to detect smears on the internet from the right and bring those to the attention of the communications director along with a plan of action to deal with them. Let's just say that the Edwards campaign didn't do this.

Content management: Since good bloggers do a lot of listening, bloggers are in a good position to write emails that resonate and blog posts that help describe your candidate's position. Again, coordination with the comm team is critical.

Online Surrogate Management: Campaign bloggers should serve as the editor of the campaign blog, bringing in perspectives from field, media, management, surrogates, candidate and campaign manager.

Blogger Outreach: Campaign bloggers need to communicate with a network of bloggers that share their candidate's values and are interested in the race. They should use this network to influence influentials and reach voters as efficiently as possible. They must also communicate with the larger universe of bloggers who have interest but not allegiance to your candidate, providing them with information they find helpful and open discourse.

Somebody upthread posted (facetiously, I assume) that Odom should run for president. Odom should seriously consider joining the Republican presidential primary race.

In the end, he wouldn't wind up being their candidate for a number of reasons, but I can't think of a better platform for a smart, unapologetic general with the ultimate military street cred to take direct action against the simpering neo-con water-carriers.

Can you just imagine all those Project for a New American Century ideologues over on the McCain campaign going nuts as Odom squashes their shibboleths during national TV debates? He'd reset the boundaries of the whole debate and neoconservatism would be out of bounds.

PS

If a Republican presidential candidate promised to strangle neoconservatism and throw it on the dustbin of history, I would be very open to voting Republican in 2008.

I really appreciate your response to Mason regarding Clownsense (though i appreciate Mason's point of view too about dominant posters). I hope that lurkers with ideas who have been reticient to articulate will be emboldened by your respect and interest.

I also appreciate the presence of old "hippies" like William Timberman (as I gathered about you from the recent adnoto exchange in the Broder thread). I tracked a number of posts over at MYDD by Matt Stoller about the 60s, where he complains that the movements of the 60s failed to leave us any institutions to grow a new progressive movement. But then on the other hand, he describes the netroots as a young, rich white collar movement that is the antithesis of the old hippies and the sterotypes slapped on them. Maybe if he left space in the definition for the old vets of those movements, we'd at least have the benefit of their experience.

WT writes:

In a very real sense, our hippy legacy is the right-wing which plagues us today.

That is a very interesting and complex thought. It reminds me of how I think of David Horowitz: In the 60s he seemed to be trying to destroy the country from the left, and now he's trying to destroy the country from the right. His political content has changed but the nasty vitrolic form remains the same.

You may have meant something else entirely though.

Very early in this thread i said:

I can't think of a better platform for a smart, unapologetic general with the ultimate military street cred to take direct action against the simpering neo-con water-carriers.

I just want to clarify that I don't mean to imply that military service makes the citizenship of any person greater or more important than that of anybody who hasn't served. I just mean that I think a military person with that kind of credibility is the perfect foil for neo-con war-loving militarists.

I say that not from partisanship--most ex-military with any experience in Iraq are lining up with the Democrats (my party), and I'm a veteran myself. I just believe that it's anti-democratic (anti-American) to put the military or individual members of it on a pedestal over the rest of the citizenry.