First, thanx to those who braved the onset of autumnal rains to attend the li’l “weblogs: what the heck do they all mean?” panel Thursday night. Alas, Rebecca Blood called in sick and couldn’t show. But the rest of us had a fab time and even attained a couple of insights about this whole web-writing phenom.

Since the evening had been organized under the auspices of the Society of Professional Journalists, a major discussion theme concerned whether blogging constituted a threat to “traditional” journalism. I, for one, said no.

For one thing, many blog-type sites are full of links to stories on “traditional” newspapers’ and TV stations’ sites, and therefore help those sites attract readers.

For another thing, the “blog” tag encompasses a staggering array of different types of sites. Within the basic premise of chronological, scrolling text bits, different blogs have different proportions of links to other sites’ stuff (accompanied by longer or shorter intros to those links), discussion-board entries, personal observations, original and/or found graphics, and, yes, actual research- and interview-based journalism—all on a much wider range of topics, both “public” and “private,” than any one print publication could ever fit in.

My own site is organized the way my old print column was, as an amalgam of longish and shortish items expressing facets of an overarching worldview. It is, as I’ve always said, a classic journalistic format.

The panel’s moderator, Alan Boyle, is the author of a blog that’s part of a “traditional” journalism site (MSNBC). His mix includes three-dot-column type items, links to recommended stuff on other sites, emailed reader responses to previous items on the blog and on other MSNBC.com pages, and longish essays and news pieces with links added. The whole olio is bound together aesthetically by Boyle’s writing style and by his curatorial sense for topic- and link-picking.

Boyle’s page proves a blog can be maintained under the auspices of a big institution, and can hew to the legal/ethical rules of professional journalism, while also providing the personal “voice” that keeps readers clicking in.

Here we get to the big thing that differentiates blogging from corporate journalistic editing.

Most daily papers and TV news operations (and, to a lesser extent, radio news operations and news magazines) have tried for half a century to maintain faceless, institutional images. A big-city, chain-owned paper is written in an impersonal style, and presents a mix of what its editorial bureaucracy thinks you want to read and what its publishing bureaucracy wants to tell you (which is usually whatever the local business leaders want you to believe).

It didn’t use to always be this way. As any glance at a typical (i.e., non-NY Times paper from before 1950 can show you, papers used to know the value of a more direct rapport with readers. Writers and editors had more leeway to include emotions, passions, wordplay, and all the other time-honored techniques of effective storytelling. The papers themselves often had well-defined, well-expressed points of view that weren’t confined to one page. (Granted, most of those points of view were at least as reactionary as those on today’s talk radio, but at least you knew where they stood.)

Old-time radio had its own individualistic commentators. Lowell Thomas, Walter Winchell, and Louella Parsons entertained as they informed. Edward R. Murrow and Charles Collingwood provided extremely personal accounts of the stories they told, while holding to standards of accuracy and fairness.

The best, most “professional” blog sites combine this storytelling sense with the dynamic immediacy of the web. They represent not a threat to “real” journalism but the rediscovery of values the profession has lost.

How this might relate to the recent elections: There’s not much of a “liberal news media” these days, despite what the right-wing demagogues keep screeching. There’s the far-right conservative media, and the near-right corporate media. Democrats, especially progressive Democrats, are routinely ignored, dismissed, or directly vilified in both media camps, with relatively few opportunities to speak for themselves.

We need to build a for-real “liberal media” camp. One that goes beyond a few little magazines that circulate in ivory towers or intellectual ghettos. One that speaks to larger swaths of the populace offering agendas for empowerment, progress, justice, equality, liberty, and opportunity. The corporate media won’t, and more importantly can’t, do this.

Individual, first-person blogs can’t do it all either. No one person can cover everything (or even link to everything). No all-volunteer operation (which almost all blogs are) can fully do the same job as full-time researchers and interviewers.

But the aforementioned values of blogging—of personable storytellers, regularly delivering well-selected info, in digestible chunks, to an attentive and involved readership—can form the essential foundation of any new progressive communication outlets.