And agreed, Kos is not unlike a publisher.

Agreed also that the convention credentialing was a gimmick– though the link I provided, and I was uncharacsterically brief there, was to Chris Nolan’s spotting Kos wearing a media pass at the much smaller Western Caucus of the Demoncratic National Committee.

Just my luck this evening– DKos has been breaking some big news (along with the usual suspects and some bit players) about charges of plagiarism, to add to the charges of bigotry of the WashingtonPost.com’s “RedAmerica” blogger hired two days ago. Marshall of course dug up the Abramoff connection. That said, the DKos community can claim to have brought down a blogger and a fake white house correspondent. Marshall brought down a Senator and a White House policy.

And the OJR angle here should be: do newspapers really know what they’re getting into with blogging? Soliciting reader submissions is a good thing; interactive comments are good; but the “anything goes” mentality of blogging may simply not be what we should looking for from a newspaper.

I found it curious that while Kos initially insisted that he was not a journalist, his subsequent description of what he does has much in common with journalism, at least, journalism as it ought to be practiced — get the facts, try to get them right and don’t worry about who you tick off in the process.

That said, Kos is upfront about the fact that he’s looking for facts to promote an agenda. Which is why, if an argument is to be made that he really is a journalist, one would have to categorize him as an opinion journalist. (FWIW, I think a journalist’s only agendas ought to be finding and telling the truth — forget about other ideologies.)

Whether one wants to apply the Holy “J” word to Kos or not, he is more significant, in my view, at least, for building a wildly popular political forum from scratch. On that, he has some engaging advice for online journalists, even those for whom the Holy “J” label is worn with no dispute.

And, FWIW, can’t we all agree at this point that the “credentialing” of bloggers at the political conventions in 2004 was, at its heart, a publicity stunt? Credentialing, whether at political conventions or other PR events, very often has little to do with enabling journalism and everything to do with generating buzz for the event and its promoter.

That Kos is granted a press pass to political conventions, that he is one of the major advocates for media exemption for “bloggers”– his defense is not to support the role of an independent press but to say that if Jerry Falwell gets the media exemption, so can Kos.

The Daily Kos functions as an information source for many people, and he functions as its publisher. Why is its decision-making process less transparent than the average newspapers? Who are the editors? Or as, they are called, “guest bloggers”? I contacted one of the current ones, who I had previously spoken with on a story last year, and asked her these questions; she told me, it’s not too hard, just dive in for a week, or ask me anything you need to know. Why should the governance setup of the largest political website be left to someone else to document?

Over a year ago, I actually brought up some questions for Daily Kos and engaged some of the forum members to learn more. Still one question sticks out– why Josh Marshall, who is a journalist, all by himself kick DKos’s ass? (symbolically speaking of course) By any measure– except for book promotionalism– Marshall ahs been able to break more news, do more journalist-activism, be more enjoyable to read, franchise better…

The curious answer I got from the DKos community was that the comparison was not fair: Marshall was “white-collar” while Kos was “blue-collar”– a real working stiff, an angry young man with his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand.

In other words, he’s the O’Reilly of the Left. But at least O’Reilly aspires to be a journalist.