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Watch your back, reporters!

Before I’d seen anybody worth their salt report it, before CNN ran a “Breaking News” headline or the LA Times plastered his headshot across its homepage, I heard that Michael Jackson was dead. It was the Huffington Post, an outlet I’m just barely beginning to trust, and Twitter, one I’ll never fully believe, before anything else, and that was the weirdest part of the King of Pop’s death. How could it be true if we weren’t hearing it from the people who were supposed to tell us?

And then a friend that night offered up the insight that the Internet had finally won. Machine was faster than Man.

Well, sorry buddy, but I must confess that I still abide by the tortoise-and-the-hare adage. Not because of execution, but rather because of focus.

The genetic makeup of a blog gives anybody who wants it a voice. Anybody in the world with access to a computer and the Internet can set up a URL and be blogging away on whatever they’d like in less than five minutes tops.

This is an excellent thing.

Thanks to blogs we have lists and video compilations and more lists, weird write-ups about goblins and an inside track into the mind of a crazy middle aged Austinite. Through blogs I can find out what Jennifer Aniston and Dave Schwimmer’s kid really would’ve looked like had they fornicated off the Friends set and listen to the 20 best beats DJ Premier ever made without having to go to the record store.

But I can also get a lot of crap, and you know it when you see it. “Tupac’s Alive!,” they’ll say. Or, just the same, “Jeff Goldblum’s Dead!”

This is a very bad thing.

It got worse last month, when John Doe blogger JRod (real name Jerod Morris) wrote about half a million words on Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Raul Ibanez and his recent, albeit late-in-career, power surge.

The issue caught wind with the sports media and their counterparting bloggers, and they got Ibanez’s take and the talking heads on ESPN spent hour after hour considering whether or not JRod took a cheap shot at Ibanez’s character (he did) and whether or not the general public has the right to assume old players on power surges were on some sort of steroids (they do).

But we never got to talking about whether or not we should care how Morris thinks.

Now, had Mitch Albom or Bob Ryan written “The Curious Case of Raul Ibanez,” we might be tackling an entirely different issue altogether, but they’re both sportswriters who, because they write for print (read as “old”) publications, can’t take that kind of risk. Morris, on the other hand, doesn’t even go so far as to offer up his full name in a byline and (this is speculation here) likely doesn’t pay his full lot of bills writing midwestsportsfans.com blog posts.

Caught between a blog and a hard place

Let’s take a deeper look. Morris wrote his piece on Raul Ibanez on June 8. He was still talking about it a month later, not out of choice, but because, as he writes, he’s been “caught up discussing the issue more than I’d planned on… because I still receive plenty of email and comments asking me about it.” He’d even admitted a few weeks prior that he was out of line bringing up the potential for steroid use, and he was still just writing, writing, writing. Keepin’ the people happy, happy, happy.

It’s not Morris’s fault though. Seriously, did the punishment really fit the crime? He can write what he wants; it’s a blog. They are, by definition, an individual’s self-made and self-published thoughts.

Newspapermen freak out, though, and refuse to join the army. It’s been talked about for years, since Alex Rubalcava published “Why My Column Doesn’t Matter” in The Harvard Crimson back in 2002. You’d think everyone would get along a little better by now.

As we move forward – and the case of blogs inching closer and closer (or maybe further and further past) to newspapers is surely moving forward – pay close attention to who you’re getting your news from. Our bet is that newspapers will make the proper adjustments and emerge once-again as the most trusted sources, only this round their articles will appear to you as blogs, not in folds.

Until then, expect the bickering to continue, the lines to be drawn in the sand, and the grey area surrounding blogger legitimacy to press down thick as a New England fog.