Can blogs do journalism?

Great post by Scott Carp over at Publishing 2.0 about Gawker’s search for a real live journalist.

Nick Denton, publisher/owner of Gawker Media (aka that one guy who’s supposedly raking in all that cash) , wrote this in the post advertising a managing editor opening: “We’re casting a wide net for candidates, beyond the clubby world of bloggers. Because Gawker is becoming a larger and more complex operation, and, frankly, a more traditional one.” And “It’s no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories.”

Whoa. As Karp points out, it’s a silly question to ask whether blogs can do journalism–after all, quality, not platform is what we’ve been told for years–and a blog “is just a content management system — revolutionary because it made web-native publishing free and easy for anyone — but at the end of the day still just a CMS.”

Anyway, this is a fascinating turn of events. If newspapers can’t or won’t embrace the Web, maybe Web folks will start embracing newspapers.

Or something.