I'm sick of being called a teenage fanatic

I'm getting a bit tired of the main stream media portraying political bloggers as teenage crazies talking about stuff they know nothing about. Today, Maureen Dowd did it again. She's been attending the Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas (along with just about everyone else except me) that's named after Markos Moulitsas' Daily Kos blog.

I tracked down the cult leader [Markos], wading through a sea of Kossacks, who were sitting on the floor in the hall with their laptops or at tables where they blogged, BlackBerried, texted and cellphoned — sometimes contacting someone only a few feet away. They were paler and more earnest than your typical Vegas visitors, but the mood was like a masquerade. This was the first time many of the bloggers had met, and they delighted in discovering whether their online companions were, as one woman told me, male, female, black, white, old, young or "in a wheelchair."

and,

...I'll be at the Cleopatra slot machine pondering a career in blogging, which will set me up to get back into mainstream media someday.

Markos may look young (he looks about 18) but he's 34 or so. Other blog leaders like Duncan Black (Atrios) are (guessing) in their 50s. Duncan has a Ph.D. and is (or was) a professor of economics. Max Sawicki and Brad DeLong are both seasoned academics with Ph.D.s in economics and years under their belts. Yes, there are some young bloggers, but there are certainly many, many seasoned professionals who know as least as much about law, politics, and economics as 99.9 percent of the reporters in the mainstream media.

So, you guys in the MSM, stop pretending we're a bunch of children.

And, no, few of us are trying to take your jobs. Most of us are not, and do not pretend to be, doing hands on reporting (one notable exception is Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo).
We need the main stream media to do that. What we are doing is sifting through the noise to find what we believe to be the important stories carried, but often under reported, in the main stream media. We are also analyzing the data produced by the main stream media to interpret it for ourselves and others.