Wendy M. Grossman is co-editor of Skeptic magazine and was a judge for the Online Journalism Awards. The full text of her last book, net.wars, is online for free. She is a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com.

A few years ago -- say 1995 -- it was fashionable to say that the Internet was going to kill off journalism. No one, the argument went, was going to need reporters when they could access the raw material themselves; we would only need editors to act as gatekeepers and weed out the garbage.

That theory's rather obvious flaw was that people pay to read journalists' witterings for exactly that reason: They do not want to spend the hours it takes to read the raw material. Soon after a follow-up theory was developed: Editors would no longer be necessary. Writers welcomed the idea that they would be able to write directly for the public without the intervening moderatorial hand of an editor and without having to conform to the business decisions of a commercial publisher.

Is it really the Net's fault?

Which journalistic tradition is worse?

Then along came Matt Drudge, and all we heard was how Drudge, who got his start on that haven of malice known as alt.showbiz.gossip, was damaging journalism. One guy in a hat was suddenly worse than the fine tradition of reporting than Rupert Murdoch and a host of corporate budget-cutters combined. As if the Net invented "tabloid journalism." (No one ever points out that Drudge's reporting may be questionable, but his Web site is incredibly useful because it links to all the U.S. syndicated columnists as well as searches the main news wires.)

If you are a Nethead, it is hard to summon a lot of reverence for mainstream media sometimes. A few weeks ago, every British newspaper ran screaming headlines announcing that staff of the super-secret agency formerly known as MI6 were at risk because a Web site had published their names and real-world addresses. It took the sarcastic, two-man, electronic digest Need to Know to point out that it would have been more sensible for M16 to move the staff first and then blow the whistle on the Web site. Instead, the service ensured maximum publicity for the leak by asking newspaper and magazine editors not to publish the site's address.

A quick search on Deja News revealed that a) the list had been circulating on Usenet for something like two years, and b) everyone was now looking for the site, having been alerted to its existence by the press coverage. A cynical person might think that the point of the exercise was to manipulate the press into coming on board with the idea of regulating the Net. No doubt this story -- like Time magazine's shameful and discredited 1995 story on "Cyberporn" -- will be cited every time someone wants to prove how dangerous the Net can be to civilized people.

Guerrilla journalism

Most interesting, the Internet is beginning to blur the distinctions between what is and is not journalism -- a consequence people did not predict. For example, Gibraltar-based Gibnet pointed a Web cam at the customs station on the border between Spain and Gibraltar in order to document what they claim is harassment and deliberate slowdowns by the Spanish authorities who continue to stake a claim to sovereignty over Gibraltar. Is this journalism?

At a meeting at the Freedom Forum earlier this year, this effort was presented as guerrilla journalism. But would the same apply if the anti-abortion campaigners running the noxious Nuremberg Files site (now mirrored at netfreedom.net) go through with plans to point Web cams at the doors of abortion clinics? Both are campaigns, and both show some part of reality; if we call one journalism and not the other, aren't we saying that it is journalism as long as we agree with the purpose?

Or take the McSpotlight Web site, which has made available online the evidence amassed in the so-called McLibel case. The site documents many details of McDonald's worldwide operations that the company probably would rather not be exposed, along with daily transcripts from the trial, comments, witness statements and photographs. This is the kind of lovingly detailed coverage newspapers could put together to expand their print publications online, but generally do not. (A worthy exception is Town Online's coverage of the Louise Woodward case.)

Blurring the lines

On July 1, the winners of the British Online Journalism Awards will be announced. Entries for the awards ran the gamut, from the official and lavishly funded BBC site to a site documenting repossession practices by the major British lending institutions. They include other non-traditional entries, such as the AOL-based service Out There News, which has conducted live interviews with people under attack in Kosovo, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and Foto8, an unusually well-designed photojournalism site.

Maybe things will change as more organizations enter the online journalism world. Perhaps 10 or 20 years from now it will be as weird for an amateur operation working out of conviction to be considered for awards like these as it would now for the entirely volunteer-run publication such as The Skeptic to go up against the broadsheet newspapers for a print award.

I hope not. A lot of passion and effortful research has gone out of commercial journalism in the last 10 years, partly because budgets have been cut so sharply that if you cannot investigate something by making a few phone calls, it probably is not going to get investigated. The Web -- and more specifically online journalism -- is changing the rules.

That leads to the really interesting question for the future: If the line between journalists and non-journalists really is becoming blurred, what of the special privileges typically extended to the press? If the press have them, shouldn't everyone?