Huffington Post: what other bloggers think?

I've been scouring the net to try and find some passionate, angry reaction typical of the blogosphere to last week's news that the Huffington Post will start hiring reporters and paying them, much like the traditional media does. I automatically thought that the blogosphere would be in an uproar over this - the overall tone of blogs is anti-MSM and they see themselves as more transparent, democratic, etc. But so far all I've found are shockingly positive responses from the head honchos:

Jeff Jarvis, creator of Buzzmachine, a respected blog that covers media developments, sees this as a good step for the blogosphere and says, "It’s the next step for HuffPo and the blogosphere, to add more original reporting as it becomes worthwhile to do so. And it’s the next step for more and more institutional journalists to venture into the future," he wrote. He clearly thinks it's good that more traditional journalists are moving to alternative media, and points to the Washington Post's political editor John Harris and top political correspondent Jim VandeHei moving to jump start the online publication The Capitol Leader. He points out one more important thing: "Note, too, that it will soon be more difficult to tell the difference between old and new, as blogs and reporting and reporters blog. It’s all news." Is this blurring of the line a good thing? Jarvis doesn't explicitly say, but he seems to think so.

In Matthew Ingram's blog, he support's HuffPo's move as well, but doesn't mention what this means for the blogosphere. Ingram seems to think that the HuffPo is transforming traditional journalism, when it seems to me that it's actually the opposite. "In my view, newspapers had better get their running shoes on, because online media like Huffington Post and PaidContent are already halfway down the track," he writes.

The IP Democracy blog poses: "Which raises an interesting question about the difference between blogs staffed by top-notch journalists and newspapers staffed by top-notch journalists. The question is: what’s the distinction between those two? The Huffington Post’s decision to hire “real” journalists only further blurs the boundaries between newspapers and blogs..." but he doesn't answer it, which was what I was looking for.

One of Buzzmachine's commentors from Brooklyn Kitchen has the sort of reaction I expected: "That said, it’s hard for me to believe the hype about how new media will revolutionize the way news is produced and distributed, when it very quickly falls into line with the same-old-shit that we’ve always known. The new editor coming as she does from established media sources, is hardly a HuffPo challenge to old media, it’s more of a capitulation." With this Huffington Post news it does seem that the blogosphere is just following the mainstream, when their goal was to fight against it.

Surprisingly the reaction among most bloggers was to report the news of the Huffington Post jumping ship into traditional journalism, but not delve deeper into it. Maybe they are posing questions and not following up with it because no one really knows the answer. It will be interesting to see how this all works out and if other blogs following in HuffPo's footsteps.