Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free.

NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin wrote yesterday about the Mixed Signals blog. His tone, and that of JJ Sutherland and Robert Smith, who authored the blog before Seabrook, imply that the main difference is that bloggers are snarky and puckish.

For the past weeks, Sutherland and Smith... have commented on a astonishing range of NPR stories, backroom gossip and extra angles on stories that didn’t quite make it past the editors, but which the bloggers, in their own puckish way, deemed worthy of note and mention.

Without the blog, these guys were just journalists; snarkless, puckless, and therefore able to draw a salary - though today, Seabrook asks why she can't be snarky as a journalist. Would this blur the line too much?

Mr. Dvorkin also gives some insight to the origin and purpose of Mixed Signals. I had assumed it was an attempt by NPR to reach out to the new medium, as the NPR website itself once extended from the radio network. A sort of asexual budding, as NPR tried to produce a version of itself that could speak the language of blogosphere denizens. And to some degree, that appears to be the case.

...it is another opportunity for listeners to comment on and to challenge NPR’s programming decisions.

Dvorkin quotes Jeffrey Katz, the Senior Supervising Producer at NPR Digital Media:

We started a daily blog to bring a voice to our Web site. It's a way of guiding our audience through some of the most interesting offerings we have on the air and on the Web. It's also a way of connecting what we do to the rest of the Internet, pointing out stories and developments that we think will be of interest.

We have a lot of remarkable audio on our Web site, and we've increased our photographic resources, too. But our readers have told us they also want more text, to be able to have more that they can read and scan. And blogs are a convenient way for readers to respond to what they hear and read on NPR and to connect with one another. We received about 2,000 comments to our blog and to two community forums in the past month. Those readers' opinions and ideas add real value to what we do.

But, interestingly, Mr. Dvorkin indicates that the purpose is not just to be a news blog, but also an office journal.

Newsrooms have always been great sources of endlessly amusing storytelling, absurdist observations and wry notes on the idiosyncrasies of humanity -- especially the foibles of journalists.

So Mixed Signals is meant not to be a news blog, but more an actual log of the thoughts of the journalist du jour - something more along the lines of what blog researcherer James Richards is talking about when he says:

In my experience blogs are demonstrative that we all have something to share about our lives and blogging is just one of many ways of doing this.

This is not traditional journalism by any stretch of the imagination; nor is it for commerical gain.

In this sense, it may have more in common with blogs by chefs, wedding planners, preachers, prostitutes, teachers, delivery drivers, and secretaries than with the main NPR website. But as I noted, it is a young blog, and is still getting its identity. And each time they switch writers, they may be changing the motivation for blogging.

Seabrook's desire to be snarky may ultimately be the biggest difference between journalists and bloggers. I do not have any financial incentive to refrain from blasting away at any public figure or policy that strikes me as foolish. What are you going to do - cancel your subscription to this site? There are no financial strings attached to my writing, nor consequences for unsubstantiated assertions or conjecture. Provided I steer clear of actual libel, I can get away with saying quite a bit that Seabrook cannot afford to say. While the title of this piece may sound like the opening to a joke, it is a question that is more and more topical as newspapers, magazines, and now radio networks attempt to delve into the blogosphere. But if the media blogger is a journalist first, they won't be able to help sounding like a journalist - an outsider who is dabbling in the blog fad. It may be that the average reader won't know or care about the difference, but it will still be there. Would a simple dash of puckishness be enough to make a newspaper "blog" a part of the regular Daily Kos / Glenn Reynolds community?

Let me leave you with this final thought from the NPR Ombudsman:

The value of a blog is precisely in its spontaneity and in the play of opinions between the blogger and the listeners. The blogger must do this several times a day in order for the blog to remain "fresh."

Several times a day? Ouch. AtlasBlogged = pwned.