The Globe and Mail’s Christie Blatchford - who is reporting from the Olympics in Beijing — has written an interesting perspective on the impact on journalists of blogging and other new media delivery. 

The full column can be found here.  Here’s an excerpt:

It is not true that anyone can write. It is not true that anyone can write on deadline. It is not true that anyone can do an interview. It is not true that anyone can edit themselves and sort wheat from chaff. It is not true that even great productive writers . . . can hit a home run every time they sit before the laptop. But the odds of them doing it are greatly increased if they haven’t already filed 1,200 words to the Web, shot a video, done a podcast and blogged ferociously all day long.

When my cohort first started out, we would get actual letters, often written in beautiful handwriting on creamy stationery. These readers went to some trouble to communicate with us, and usually we tried to write back. Then came e-mails, and though obviously they required less effort, in the early days they tended to be thoughtful, and most of us also tried to answer them. Then the volume became overwhelming, pseudonyms became common and sometimes, if you answered a note, you would learn later that your answer to one anonymous stranger had been posted somewhere, or e-mailed to 20 other people you didn’t know.

And now there is blogging, and comments. Readers may take 30 seconds to post a comment on a story or blog item that a writer dashed off in a minute. On The Globe website, our slogan is “Join the Conversation,” but in the blogosphere, what follows isn’t usually a conversation but a brief, ungrammatical shouting match. You can have more pensive chats in a bar fight.

And journalism wasn’t meant to be a conversation, anyway. It was maybe a monologue, at its most democratic a carefully constructed dialogue. If readers didn’t like or agree with the monologues in paper A, they bought paper B. What was most important about their opinions was that they thought enough to spend the coin.

. . . We all have a limited number of things to say, informed opinions, funny lines, quirky observations. We have only so many words in us. Do we really want to spend them on something as ephemeral as a blog?

I have written some astonishingly banal columns in my life, and some very personal ones. I am the last person in the world who should object to blogging, but I do.

The thing that I know, as all the editors I have had also know, is what I didn’t get to confide or write or commit to paper, because someone else had the good sense to put on the brakes. There are no brakes, and thus there is no joy, in blogville.