Poor ol’ Tom Humphrey, the Nashville bureau chief for the Knoxville News Sentinel, has his knickers in a twist about blogging. Burdened (that seems the right word, given his tone) with the task of jotting down some material before heading off to cover the GOP convention in NYC, he leads off with this quip:

After all, bloggers, I am instructed, do not have to follow those ironclad rules of attribution, fact-checking, logic and such that burden the daily production of stuff to print by traditionally ink-stained wretches. You can just babble like a talk show radio guy.

Well, um… no. Wrong.

As anyone who noses around the political blogs (or even the marcom/PR weblogs!) can attest, there’s a broad, deep universe of experts willing to fact-check every word you type. This post-publication fact checking may not fit the old media model of the copy desk, but it does something all the newspaper marketing departments haven’t been able to duplicate: It’s empowered readers and put them into partnership with those who publish.

This partnership means there’s a more equal distribution of risk — responsibility — in the publishing model. John Podhoretz of the New York Post calls this the democratization of media, and he (unlike poor Tom) gets it.

Readers have greater responsibility for separating the wheat from the chaff, a big change from the old model. But content publishers (how’s that for a dotcom-era phrase?) have more responsibility as well. To succeed, they must be open to critique. They must be true to a consistent and authentic voice. And they must reach out, engaging readers in a dialogue rather than a monologue.

Unlike the geographic lock most newspapers have for subscribers, weblogs operate in a true market economy of ideas, with reputation the coin of the realm.

And what is reputation? This is the part that both befuddles and infuriates many old-line media types. In the world of personal publishing characterized by (but not limited to) weblogs, reputation is (stay with me here) based on whatever criteria the individual reader assigns.

Biased? That’s going to be OK with some readers. Arcane viewpoint? OK with others. Don’t write in AP style? OK with just about everyone (with all due apologies to my copyediting friends).

My guess is that’s threatening to Tom, and I’m sorry. But things won’t change, so he needs to get with the program.

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