This weekend’s Sunday Oregonian published a package of three pieces intended to consider not the question of “blogs versus mainstream media” but “blogs as mainstream media.”

As the one-time publisher of Portland Communique, I was asked to contribute my views based upon my personal experience.

But the full version addressed some questions more fully, including the financial realities of blogging full-time on the local level and that pesky matter of blogs as mainstream media.

The money quote on that latter question, to entice you to read the entire piece:

“What’s considered ‘mainstream’ media is a function of what’s available to people, not a function of how that media functions or what it covers. There is not much that is more mainstream than people seeking out information and opinion to help them make sense out of their lives. As more people turn to blogs for this, that may make them mainstream, but it doesn’t have to mean the blog form somehow has ‘sold out’.”

Jay Rosen’s PressThink offers a thorough look at the flap over Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing blog for WashingtonPost.com.

Allow me to add my $.02 to Rosen’s excellent report, in an effort to provide some additional perspective to these sorts of things:

I spent about three years, early in career, working as an editorial writer for a GOP-leaning newspaper. In that job, as one might expect, I had regular contact with individuals and think tanks that help craft and disseminate conservative political opinion. (Less with sources on the left.) So I can say, from personal experience, that political conservatives in America years ago declared a private war on objective journalism. As part of that, the right has worked diligently to create an alternate media where information’s value is judged internally by its political utility to the right, rather than by the quality of empirical evidence supporting it.

Yet mainstream journalists remain reticent to acknowledge that fact when reporting on conflicts between the conservatives and the press.

Which isn’t surprising, I suppose. How does the press acknowledge this conflict without implicitly accepting it? And how can the press accept this conflict without abandoning its commitment to reporting on both sides of the ideological spectrum without favor? It’s just a lot easier, intellectually, to pretend the conflict does not exist – to go on believing that the right subscribes to some unspoken covenant that respects the practice of objective journalism and to treat any complaint about a reporter or a story (or a blog) as substantive on the issue of journalistic process, rather than simply being an objection to that process’s result.

But that’s not accurate. Or honest. The political right does not want Americans getting their information from objective journalists, whether they be reporters or columnists. It wants Americans to get their news from agents of the political right. (The left might entertain similar fantasies, but, to date, it has made nowhere near the coordinated effort to make them happen that the right has.) This, among daily newspapers at least, is the great underreported media story of our generation. And the Dan Froomkin flap is merely the latest episode within it.

I’m sorry to report that Mark Glaser is leaving OJR.

We’ll be posting his final column for us, a look at podcasting at National Public Radio, in a couple hours. Mark’s leaving us to work on a book, and then to launch a new project with PBS.org.

Actually, I’m being quite selfish in expressing regret. Mark’s done great work for us over the past few years and has earned all the opportunities that have come his way. I’m grateful that he’s stuck with us as long as he has. (And, yes, I’m twisting his arm to come back now and then and file an occasional piece for us.)

Best wishes on your new ventures, Mark.

As for OJR, we’re going to be running pieces from a variety of freelance writers in Mark’s Tuesday slot, in addition to the features and commentaries we run on Thursdays. (And, of course, I’m here blogging each weekday, along with our USC student writers on the daily news blog.) We’re also working on a new online journalism website that we’ll be launching after the New Year. Finally, we at USC Annenberg are excited about the possibility of someone many of you know joining the school (and, I hope, appearing regularly on OJR) in 2006. Stay tuned.