Bloggers are not just journalists, they are the new publishers and producers, editors and news managers, columnists, photographers and artists

Bloggers are journalists. Bloggers are more than journalists.

Move over, mainstream media. Here comes you, me, them, and We, the Media!

YouMedia and WeMedia are more interactive, more convergent, more interlinked and more interconnected with their newssources and newsmakers than the socalled mainstream media.

They can report the news, spice the news up with better features, and churn out their own first-person views, if not those of third parties, solicited or not, regarding any one or all personalities, events, places and passions, inside and out, up close and personal.

Compared to mainstream journalists, bloggers can report the news (as is, where is) and disseminate their news and views, in real time. You need not wait for the early- or late-night news on TV or tomorrow's edition of the newspaper to get any news live, and the protagonists and antagonists, alive, in living color, so to speak.

Add on to weblogging the socalled Web 2.0 social networking platforms, from Facebook and Twitter, to MySpace and Friendster, etcetera, and what will you get: It's the future of news. It's social media. It's future is now.

Declares Arianna Huffington, queen ant-and-bee of the online Washington Postish-wannabe at http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=120584762130:

"Despite all the current hand-wringing about the dire state of newspapers, we are actually in the midst of a Golden Age for news consumers. We can surf the net, use search engines, access the best stories from around the world, and interact by commenting and forming communities.
"The days of publishing pooh-bahs dictating to us what's important and what's not are over. We now can get the news we want, when we want it, how we want it and where we want it.
"The Web has given us control over the news we consume. Now the explosive growth of online social networking is fundamentally changing our relationship with news as well. It's no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, react to news and share news.
"News has become an important element of community — something around which we gather, connect and converse. We all are part of the evolution of a story now — expanding it with comments and links to relevant information, adding facts and differing points of view.
"In short, the news has become social. And it will become even more community-powered: stories will be collaboratively produced by editors and the community, and conversations, opinion, and reader reactions will be seamlessly integrated into the news experience..."

But, of course, press freedom and related freedom of expression of bloggers, so with print or broadcast journalists, should be more responsible and more responsive to the call of the times. That can make bloggers as "more effective and more efficient" advocacy journalists, specially, if and when he or she practices the ethics and standards of decent, good taste, and fit to publish blog posts for all the world to take a quick-read or study in full.

Marc my word, bloggers as journalists and journalists as bloggers both deserve the same respect we accord the big and small professional practitioners of the fourth estate (the press and the media). Bloggers who are dubbed to belong to the "fifth estate" of the web's blogosphere have rights, too.

When in doubt, please refer to http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal regarding the legal rights of webloggers. Feel free to discuss its merits and demerits, uphold it, sustain it, improve upon it, and live it.