Former TV news person Mark Kelley has written a book,  “Engaging News Media: A Practical Guide for People of Faith.” Kelley is also a professor at the University of Maine.

He doesn’t like blogs, according to Bible Belt Blogger:

“Bloggers do not commit themselves to the same code of ethics as professional journalists and most of them have no training in objective reporting,” Kelley writes. “As a result, bloggers and journalists have very different ideas about how we discover the truth.”

[Kelley is still fuming that conservative bloggers cost Dan Rather his job back in 2004...He apparently believes those National Guard memos may not have been fakes.]

“Perhaps bloggers will mature into responsible journalists who can be trusted to provide the sort of factual, verifiable truth we expect from news media. But for the moment, I think they pose more of a hazard than a help to truth-seekers,” he writes.

Nonsense. There are good and bad bloggers, just like there are good and bad newspaper reporters. The same TV that gave us Ted Koppel brought us Geraldo Rivera. The same paper that gave us The Pentagon Papers also produced Jayson Blair.

Blogs are an invaluable source for religion reporters — especially those covering the Episcopal Church. To do the job right, you’ve got to be reading the Episcopal News Service and Titusonenine, Drell’s Descants and Ct6.org (plus Via Media, Louie Crew, and Integrity.)

TV and print news editors used to view themselves as “gatekeepers” — deciding all the news that’s “fit to print.” That world no longer exists. As a news executive recently said: There’s no longer a gate. There’s no longer a fence.