A blog convention I wouldn't listening in on

Jay Rosen has a good essay which he advances for his session at the upcoming BloggerCon at Harvard Law School. He poses the following questions, with more to be added:

1. Why do we say that weblogs have given the people the power of the printing press?

2. And if that's true, how does the weblog alter the public's dependence on "the press" and professional journalists?

3. What really distinguishes journalism as a practice and in what portions of the practice can citizen authors rightly, effectively share?

4. What makes the weblog a potent tool of journalism and what are its potential uses?

5. As a new platform for journalism, what does the World Wide Web offer the practitioner, the practice, the press?

6. What does a Web journalism competently done by citizens actually look like, where do we find it, and where can we imagine it going in the years ahead?

7. What lessons in excellence, competence and public service can the profession of journalism teach to citizens, amateurs, webloggers-- and to us at BloggerCon?

8. What does it mean for a weblog with journalism in it, authored by a member of the public, to have a public and to serve a public good?

9. Which goods are worth serving for webloggers doing a kind of journalism?

10. How do we understand the independence of webloggers and their voices if these voices mainly comment (and thus depend) on news and other material originated by the major media? What's so independent about that?

Some of these are pedantic, but what did you expect for a discussion group?

Rosen is a journalist who takes blogs seriously and not as a threat. His essay and this one by James W. Carey, CBS Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University.

I'm going to need to absorb these and the questions Rosen poses, and gather my thoughts. I hope I can say something useful. I respect Rosen a lot. He reminds me of Michael Kelly, whose loss I feel keenly with every new issue of the Atlantic Monthly.