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Skube's screed eviscerated:

The Journalism that Bloggers Actually Do
By Jay Rosen
Blowback! That's what you're in for when a great American newspaper runs a Sunday opinion piece as irretrievably lame as "Blogs: All the noise that fits" by Michael Skube (Aug. 19). Skube is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning author who teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina.
In 2005, he wrote a similar column for the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C. There he made fun of the "evangelical fervor that attends blogging," and suggested that bloggers were people who didn't have normal lives, or children. "I don't know many people who have time to read blogs," he wrote. "None of my neighbors do."
There was a darker theme. "I find myself doing something in my journalism class that gives me considerable unease." What was it?" ...discussing that often truculent tribe that calls itself bloggers." That students wanted to talk about blogs as journalism filled him with craft-dread.
Notice that not having time to read them didn't prevent Skube from writing about blogs, which could be considered odd behavior for a college professor. (We're supposed to read a lot, then write.)...
Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper man, calls it "journalistic malpractice." And it is that. Also pedagogical buffoonery. In Skube's columns, there’s a teacher who doesn't believe in doing his homework -- any homework.
So I did it for him. I asked friends in the blogosphere to help me put together a list of examples that would confound Skube if he knew of them, but possibly interest his students. Blog sites doing exactly what he says blog sites don’t do: "the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence ... the depiction of real life."

One of the examples he uses may be slightly familiar to y'all:

September 2004. Joseph Newcomer provides comprehensive examination of disputed Killian memos in CBS report. A computer typesetting expert, he uses his knowledge to cast serious doubt on the authenticity of documents "60 Minutes" relied on in its story on President Bush's Air National Guard service.

The biggest difference that I see today is that "journalists" just aren't interested in pursuing some stories anymore (usually stories harmful to Democrats).

Bloggers are just doing the journalism that journalists refuse to do.

-PJ

There he made fun of the "evangelical fervor that attends blogging," and suggested that bloggers were people who didn't have normal lives, or children. "I don't know many people who have time to read blogs," he wrote. "None of my neighbors do."

Reminiscent of the New York elitist Democrat who wondered how George Bush managed to win, since nobody she knew voted for him.