The New York Times recently featured a (rather tortured) story on the attempt by Warner Music to influence blogging.

The headline summed up the paper's attitude -- Warner's Tryst With Bloggers Hits Sour Note.

But the story revealed more about the Times' relationship to blogging, and the nature of blogging as journalism, than it did about the Warner case study. (I love O'Reilly covers, and I'm sure their book on blogging is quite good.)

Warner was working with a specific set of bloggers, the "MP3 blogs" that exist to talk about (and often help exchange) MP3 files. Music publishers hate MP3s, which don't usually carry copy protection, but they also know that they must reach their audience, which loves MP3s.

So Warner Music tried to salt some music blogs with MP3 from a band they were trying to break out, called Secret Machines. Some used them, others didn't. The reviews were generally mixed.

The Times was astounded by this, and that's sad. Because in real journalism, the kind The Times claims to practice, suspicions about being spun, and about "selling out" to the industry, are a good thing.

Real journalists work in the interests of their readers, not advertisers, and not sources. The bloggers who suspected the Secret Machines campaign (and blew the whistle on its excesses) were practicing real journalism. In this they are a far cry from anyone in what passes for the "music journalism" community, whether in print, radio or TV. As with all forms of business journalism (the industry I've been a part of for a quarter-century), music journalism depends on the industry to tell it what to do, what stories are worthwhile, and what messages should be passed to the audience. The audience is considered passive. (The blog featured in the Times' piece is music-for-robots.com, so I couldn't resist this satire on musical robots from Uncover.Com.)

In blogging, as in journalism as it's supposed to be, the audience is active, suspicious, questioning. Rather than condemning the blogs, as The Times does so arrogantly, we should be welcoming the appearance of journalism as it's supposed to be back into the world.

But if The Times did that, it would be admitting that journalism does not mean "working for someone who buys ink by the barrel."

Journalism means working for readers. It means caring first for their interests, and spreading the word -- good and bad -- about what you find.

The lesson I get from this story is that blogging has become more like journalism than journalism itself.