An interesting piece on the clash of old vs. new media, by Stephen Humphries at the Christian Science Monitor: Blogs look burly after kicking sand on CBS.

Since the CBS furor, the blogging community has been showered with accolades in opinion pages and editorials. Still, it’s premature to start awarding Pulitzer prizes to the laptop set. Professional journalists have been the ones consulting experts and following up promising leads.

“I would argue that we were able to do a few things that blogs were not,” avers Christopher Isham, chief of investigative projects at ABC News, one of the first news outlets to challenge CBS’s documents.

Still, a perception exists among some bloggers - and among many news consumers - that without blogs the media wouldn’t have picked up the story.

Not so, says Dan Gillmor, author of “We the Media” and columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. “People upset about the documents and raising questions would have been on the phone to every reporter they could get on the phone to.”

One advantage the bloggers did have was speed.

The “60 Minutes II” report produced photocopies of documents allegedly written by the late Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush’s commander in the Air Texas National Guard, claiming that he was being pressured to “sugar coat” Bush’s record.

Within hours of Rather’s report, hundreds of laptop users were scrutinizing the memos posted on CBS’s website.

Charles Johnson, a blogger in Los Angeles with an expertise in typography, suspected forgery: The documents looked too contemporary. He typed one of the memos into a Microsoft Word document - using the program’s default settings - and found that the CBS documents were an exact match. He sent Power Line a link to his findings at LittleGreenFootballs.com.