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Bloggers tend to be seen as the lone gunmen of web journalism. If they're not muckraking behind the scenes like Drudge or dodging bullets in Baghdad like Allbritton, they're sitting at home, safely ensconced behind their terminals, blissfully shoveling their snarky punditry into the online world without a care (or an editor) in the world.

But as romantic (or lonely) as that sounds, blogs don't always work that way. Instead, the panelists at "Flogging the Blogs" urged the audience to think of blogs as tools that can help to build community interaction on traditional news sites.

"I started buzzmachine because I had something to say," said Jeff Jarvis, CEO of Advance.net. "But the most important thing I learned was that I was joining a community, and that blogging was a medium of relationships."

Blog features like permalinks and RSS feeds make stories easy for the public to find and easy for them to syndicate, while comment fields offer instant feedback and discussion opportunities. Now, for the first time since the public journalism movement of the early 90s, news organizations have a powerful -- and cheap -- tool to interact with their readers.

The problem with the public journalism movement was that it attempted to engage the community while hanging on to the old paradigm of "newsroom knows best." Editors and reporters approached readers as leaders instead of listeners.

But as Jack Fuller said in his keynote address, journalists have to experiment and assess and adapt and be willing to change how their thinking about how works. What blogs do, when combined on a newspaper or magazine web site with traditional articles, is present the reader with an interactive tool that speaks to them on a personal level.

The blog is the perfect tool for assessing reader reaction. They can interact with the voice. And, on sites like Cleveland.com, they can also contribute via a blog of their own.

"With blogs, for the first time ever, the people have a printing press," said Jarvis. "So our first obligation is to listen to the community."

Tom Regan, associate editor of csmonitor.com, Sheila Linnen of projo.com, and Denise Polverine of cleveland.com all mentioned that the blogs on their news sites substantially increased traffic and contributed to reader satisfaction. Regan mentioned that on any given day, blog entries on his site represented three of the top 15 most popular links.

"Blogs are the best thing to happen to journalism in a long, long time," Regan said.

The most important thing for news sites to remember, Regan said, was their audience and what their readers' expectations were. Each of the panelists agreed that blogs, while they might contain more casual writing, still need to be edited.

"Anything that appears under the Monitor's name has to be edited," said Regan. "How do you edit without destroying voice? Just work with your team. You don't have to lose voice."

Some audience members raised the concern that amateur bloggers who blog for news sites like cleveland.com would be less reliable than staff bloggers.

"Are they journalists?" Jarvis said. "I don't care. Is it journalism? Yes. Is it as reliable? No. But is the audience smart enough to be the judge of that? Yeah."