That is the question that a lot of people are asking. Crystal Cox, who runs hundreds of blogs on legal and financial matters, was sued earlier this year by the Obsidian Finance Group on claims of defamation. Cox, who defended herself in court, argued that the content she published was factual based on information she received from an inside source.

However, because the court did not consider her to be part of the media, her argument had no substance. As a result, she was ordered to pay $2.5 million in damages to Obsidian Finance.

Cox spoke with WebProNews and told us that she does, in fact, consider herself to be a journalist. Although she is not certain as to what her next action will be, she did tell us that she would continue to fight for bloggers to be treated the same way as journalists are.

Should bloggers and journalists be treated equally?

Ferenstein says that more people read his content when he did original investigations and he became the source of information that all the other bloggers were talking about.

What helped Ferenstein the most in finding original sources was being a networker, and going to conferences, meeting people and developing personal relations.

To build his credibility as a blogger, Ferenstein says he tries to provide the most evidence he can on a particular subject.

Ferenstein says he always assumes that people on the Internet have acute attention deficit disorder. Everyone on the Internet skims, they are looking at Twitter feeds, Facebook, RSS and a million different sites.

He formats his blog with italics, bolds, and pictures to force the reader to focus on what he thinks is mots important for them. All readers are going to skim.

Ferenstein says he does not like the distinction between bloggers and journalists. There are some horrible journalists and great bloggers, and they could switch places and people would not notice much of a difference.

First of all, Curtis says the problem is with the newspapers and not journalism itself. In order to save the newspaper industry, he believes very creative things need to happen.

One creative innovation that is not the white knight for print is the iPad. Despite the numerous reports that have indicated that the device would save newspapers, Curtis says the reality is that people are not going to pay for something that they can get somewhere else for free.

People seem to believe that if subscription revenues were higher, the print industry would be fine. But as Curtis points out, “They’re not going to pay for ubiquitous value.”

Although new media bring many new opportunities to journalism, journalists have to understand how it works. Most journalists mistakenly think that social media simply drives a lot of traffic and therefore devote all their time to increasing their numbers. But in order for social media to really help journalists, they need to realize that content does not spread just because it goes out to a lot of users. Instead, the way to get it to spread is to make it compelling.

According to Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism at NYU and author of PressThink, the Web has brought many opportunities for journalists, as well as many new players into the news arena. In addition, the Web has destroyed the business model that previously supported the news industry.

As a result, there are now many new challenges that traditional journalists must overcome. Unfortunately, Rosen says that there is no one solution to these demands from new media. Instead, journalists need to learn the new tools and integrate the Web and mobile Web. He believes the support for journalists will be from a combination of sources such as advertisers, nonprofits, contributors, sponsorships, and more.

Looking into the future of journalism, Rosen does see a field of journalism. However, he thinks that traditional journalists will have to work more closely with others outside of the traditional medium. Journalists can be successful in the future, but they must embrace new media.

Where do you see traditional journalism heading in the future?

Topix CEO Rich Skrenta talked about the redesign on his blog. He said, “We had built up a strong local audience on the site, but a lot of it was SEO, and while users were clearly getting some value out of our product, we hadn’t made something that people really cared about.” Skrenta rejected suggestions that Topix should copy sites like MySpace or Digg before settling on the new design.