Josh's last post nicely clarifies one of the points I was clumsily trying to make in my own essay in the Stoller Series: some folks in the "netroots," as broadly construed, are into movement-building, while others are practicing an unfettered form of journalism.

But it's not that easy to separate the two tribes.

For one thing, as Josh ackowledges, both "activists" and "journalists" are often engaged in issue and electoral advocacy; that's not a recent innovation, of course, as the rich history of advocacy journalism attests.

But beyond that, folks on both sides of the line often cross it.

Anyone familiar with Josh Marshall's journalistic background knows that he holds himself pretty strictly to the standards of that profession, and that he started TPM mainly to write things he couldn't write at places like The American Prospect. Moreover, TPM initially went big-time when Josh conducted a classic guerilla journalism effort to keep the MSM from ignoring the Trent Lott/Strom Thurmond story, and helped take Lott right down.

But in his remarkable 2005 Social Security campaign, Josh clearly became an activist: not because he chose one issue and rode it for months--plenty of journalists do that--and not because he promoted one very consistent point of view. No, TPM got into activism by mobilizing its immediate and (via links) broader readership into a very pointed and very successful campaign (in conjunction, of course, with lots of more traditional offline progressive institutions)to intimidate Democrats out of any willingness to negotiate with Bush on Social Security, and then to intimidate vulnerable Republicans out of support for Bush's plan or anything like it.

To put it simply, journalists "take names," but activists "kick ass and take names." And there's no question Josh Marshall did the latter on Social Security.

On the other side of the journalist/activist divide, there's a lot of journalism bubbling up in "activist" blog sites.

When I first started NewDonkey.com as a DLC-sponsored blog back in 2004 (it's now an independent site), I placed DailyKos on my very short blogroll and kept it perpetually there, to the perpetual annoyance of a lot of my friends and colleagues. I did that not so much as an ecumenical gesture, but simply because the site was and remains one of the best places to obtain and digest political information, especially about election campaigns and public opinion research. On one of those increasingly typical late-election-cycle days when fifty polls from ten sources come pouring out, you could always count on Markos to provide a sophisticated and honest take on trends, polling techniques, comparative data, and everything else necessary to bring order out of chaos. That's journalism.

(I came a bit later to regular reading of MyDD, but that "activist" site is especially solid on deeper public opinion research).

Moreover, there's a built-in limit on the "movement-building" and message-discipline function of most activist sites: their interactivity. Sure, if you read nothing more than the "front pages" of many progressive sites, they sometimes convey an oppressive uniformity of opinion, and a repressive intolerance to dissent from whatever party line the proprietors have worked out on their conference calls. But in the diaries, and especially in the comment threads, there's obviously a healthy and anarchic diversity of opinion. And I would contend that, too, represents "journalism," of a new and more open type.

Finally, I sometimes think both "activist" and "journalist" bloggers forget the predominant reason many readers visit their sites: not to be instructed, or to express their own opinions; not to "interact," or to join a "community" or a "movement"--but simply to filter the news. You get up in the morning with limited time, read whatever crappy chain paper that enjoys a monopoly where you live. Maybe you turn on the tube and sort through the celebrity "news" in search of something real. (Worse yet, if your home town is Washington DC, the celebrity "news" is about politicians.) And then--for God knows how many people--you visit a few trusted internet sites to figure out what's really going on, and which MSM content you should actually consume.

In the end, even if you can't completely separate "activists" from "journalists" online, Josh is absolutely right in suggesting that the blogosphere serves distinct but interacting "journalist" and "activist" functions. Both add real value.