All the news that's fit to blog?

MediaPost: Blogging reveals "the power of participating in media ... the average citizen out there has something to say," says Tony Perkins, creator and editor of AlwaysOn, at a blog panel discussion. (Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.) Excerpt:

The panelists were skeptical, however, that an institution like, say, The New York Times will ever take even a tentative step in this direction. The reason? "Fright and loss of control," said Advance.net president and creative director Jeff Jarvis, an attendee who ended up speaking as much as several of the panelists. The discussion's moderator also expressed severe frustration with the reluctance of his company to embrace blogging and social networking: Fortune's David Kirkpatrick said he was "egregiously pissed off" by Time Inc.'s failure to exploit opportunities on the Web.

Other panelists included Anil Dash of Six Apart, Clay Shirky, VC Fred Wilson and blog queen Elizabeth Spiers. Attendee Jeff Jarvis, natch, also has some thoughts on yesterday's gathering, writing in part:

The bottom line is that online is a medium of relationships and thus a medium of trust. Weblogs create and reveal relationships. So do social-software networks. ...

Clay Shirky argued that the big media companies should not, or cannot, add all this conversation to their products because they're too big and the conversations will become unwieldy. And the bigger truth is that this conversation is already occurring outside of the media property on individuals' weblogs. So Clay said that a reader does not necessarily want to go to the New York Times to annotate their content (or to Perkins' Always-On to annotate his); they want to create their own content and see it linked. Or as I put it: They want the Times and Perkins to listen. Linking is listening. ...

Perkins and Kirkpatrick tried to get the discussion going around whether blogs compete with and threaten established media. Every such gathering tries to get that conversation sparked; each fails. It's a made-up fight (as in, do Superman and Darth Vader hate each other?). But I liked Anil's answer: "Blogs really compete with bad journalism." That is, when someone is dissatisfied with reporting -- because it's incomplete or from the wrong perspective or wrong -- that's when blogs kick in.

Lots of food for thought here. I don't see anything about the panel on the AlwaysOn site yet, though Tony had a posting Wednesday about his plans to write a book about Google.