Some journalists are bloggers, but not all bloggers are journalists.

A blogger is a journalist if they act like a journalist. When anyone researches a story and broadcasts the results on a blog they are a journalist.

When a blogger doesn't identify their role, you should treat them as a journalist until they indicate otherwise. Don't tell them something you don't expect to see published. Give them all the information you would any other journalist.

Journalism, in other words, is a process. It's not defined by a paycheck. It's defined by what you do. UPDATE: A new Gallup poll shows that only 5% rate journalists "very high" in honesty. Would bloggers do worse?

All this is prelude to reporting a contretemps Slate reported about The Wall Street Journal. Apparently when Dean campaign chairman Joe Trippi and aide Zephyr Teachout first approached bloggers MyDD and DailyKos in 2003 it "was explicitly to buy their airtime" in the words of Ms. Teachout (right and above, the one without the hat).

The bloggers weren't told this. Markos Moulitas (Kos) and Jerome Armstrong (MyDD) thought they were being treated as consultants, and consulted. Neither wrote anything on their blogs to disqualify the work as journalism.

Click below to see the rest of the story.

They didn't, for instance, take under-the-table money from the government to back its policies on national television. They didn't out a CIA agent. They didn't lie about sources, nor did they act dishonorably in any way.

They didn't, in fact, act like The Wall Street Journal does routinely, conflating politics and business. They treated both separately and gave readers one story. They didn't write one thing in their news columns and another in their editorials, as the Journal does.

In fact, Zephyr Teachout noted they weren't told by the Dean team that Dean was "buying their airtime," and they gave no "airtime" they didn't feel Dean earned. In fact, both cut back their editorial service to Dean while they were employed by him, resuming normal service only after leaving the campaign.

And here's the real story. The misunderstanding probably cost Dean a chance at his party's nomination. Failure to learn what they could teach is probably costing Dean still.

Both men knew, when they were employed by the Dean campaign, that Movable Type could not scale to serve a national campaign. They urged, as paid consultants, that Dean switch to Scoop. (Kos wrote about this.)

Had Dean done so in the fall of 2003 it's very possible he could have "scaled the intimacy" of the campaign (in my words), allowing those who came in January to feel like full participants in the campaign, allowing newcomers to get a feel for what was going on quickly, becoming active in their local communities quickly.

As it was, Teachout and others found themselves, in January 2004, writing multiple notes a day and seeing 500 or more responses attached to each one within an hour. Campaign newcomers wasted hours reading old notes and finding their own notes rather than getting involved in their local communities.

This turned out to be the crucial error of the Dean Campaign. Joe Trippi put all his eggs in the Iowa basket, sending thousands of orange-hatted volunteers to Iowa, where their numbers and passion actually scared people. Kerry was able to sneak in with a targeted campaign of intimate personal appearances and schmoozing of local leaders.

This could have been avoided had MyDD and DailyKos been treated as they were paid, which was as highly-trained consultants, rather than as ad avails, which is how they apparently were treated.

Dean's current campaign, for the chairmanship of the DNC, could still benefit enormously from a switch from MT to Scoop. Scoop would allow all Dean affiliates to have their own sections, at no cost, but under central management.

The tragedy of Howard Dean is a simple technology lesson that has yet to be learned. Your Clue, should you choose to run for something, is to use software that scales.