One Small Step for Mickey . . .

. . . one giant leap for the blogosphere. Buried in Kaus's dispute with Warren Mitofsky is this nugget: "Paragraphs three and four essentially claim that Mitofsky's 'members' are happy with his performance. That's not what I hear, though they are unlikely to tell me so directly. (The two I called clammed up.)"

Get that? A blogger made a phone call! That's, like, almost reporting. Excellent news.

The blogophere will really begin to change things when more bloggers do elementary reporting like this. It doesn't need to be Deep Throat dead-drops and source cultivation, but if bloggers were to routinely do minimal reporting--just making a couple phone calls, for instance--it could really hurt the old media.

You see, the dirty secret of the blogosphere is that while the New York Times does not need the blogosphere, the blogosphere needs the New York Times. Without real reporters out there finding real news, bloggers would have nothing to pontificate on, no asses to gleefully fact-check.

Yet if they began reporting, then the blogosphere would cease to be a parasite simply clinging to its Old Media host. Instead, it would begin to be a self-sustaining news organism.