Webloggers saw away on the Internet.

I have begun to notice something curious that happens most Saturday nights on the Internet. Quite soon after The New York Times and Washington Post place the articles and opinion columns for their Sunday editions online, people start posting online critiques of the material.

Over the next 24 hours or so, the online responses sometimes coalesce into a useful counterpoint and supplement to the original reporting or commentary.

The critiques may indicate holes in a story. Often, they provide a useful fact-checking function. The specialized knowledge of individual posters, whether in a scientific subfield or concerning a particular country, can be quite impressive.

Where do these critiques appear? Sometimes at online magazines. But most of them turn up at weblogs -- do-it-yourself commentary sites that journalists as well as non-journalists have created to serve as their own personalized online soapbox.

Setting up a weblog has become increasingly easy, thanks to new software tools that have appeared over the past three years. Hundreds of thousands of weblogs now exist, with more added each week. The most substantive commentary-oriented weblogs are gaining increasing notice from mainstream media.

Andrew Sullivan, a columnist and senior editor for The New Republic, noted on December 24 that during the previous week his weblog www.andrewsullivan.com received a quarter of a million visits. The weblog www.instapundit.com run by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, recently marked its one millionth visitor after being up for only four months.

Weblogs have contributed useful analysis on a range of issues. Bloggers Reynolds and Joshua Micah Marshall, a journalist whose site is at www.j-marshall.com/talk/, conducted a detailed debate in early December over how to interpret the statutory language involved in instant gun-purchase background checks for suspected terrorists.

The September 11 terrorist attacks spurred a particular burst of interest in weblogs. "There was a rush to try and figure things out after the World Trade Center was pulverized, and blogging, it turns out, was perfectly suited to the task," says Matt Welch, a Los Angeles-based journalist with both print and online experience who writes for the Online Journalism Review and runs his own weblog, www.mattwelch.com/warblog.html.

Blogging, Welch says, "allowed people to identify and bookmark some of the more interesting of the thousands of news stories that were streaming in every hour, and after awhile it helped people organize their thoughts, seek comfort in somewhat like-minded others and enjoy new voices they could trust to guide them through."

NCEW member Dan McDonough Jr. has taken the plunge into weblogging.

McDonough, deputy editorial page editor at the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., writes a weekly column, called "State of Affairs," about his state's politics on his weblog, www.danmcdonough.com. McDonough says he often takes positions that are at odds with stances taken by his paper.

"I don't think anyone mistakes my positions for those of the Courier," he says. "Somehow, I think I've created my own 'brand,' if you will -- and I get readers from all over the country, and a few from abroad who once lived in New Jersey.... Since I don't represent the Courier through the 'State of Affairs' weblog, it hasn't been an issue.

Madeleine Begun Kane, a humor columnist and member of the NCEW listserv, runs a satirical weblog called "Dubya's Dayly Diary" at www.madkane.com/bush.html.

"I've found the weblog format to be very useful for my own," Kane says. "DDD has attracted the kind of attention and regular readership that my freelance humor column writing so far hasn't managed to generate. So much so, that during its post-9/11 hiatus, I was bombarded with mail begging me to bring it back."

Because of the Internet's unique qualities, bloggers make use of several capabilities unavailable to writers operating in the print medium. Welch describes some of the advantages: "Speed of publication, obviously (no editors, no print deadlines). The ability to link, which adds a tremendous amount of transparency to the process (you can't just misquote or mischaracterize a column you disagree with) and allows you to say 'Hey! Check this out,' which print columnists obviously can't really do."

Weblogger Glenn Reynolds says he receives hundreds of e-mail messages from articulate readers each day. That inflow of information, he has said at his site, "makes me feel like I'm part of a 'hive mind' on the Web, rather than a solo author toiling away on his own."

As for the charge that weblogging is dilettantish, Welch observes: "The word dilettante to me has always been more or less equivalent to journalist -- we learn how to specialize in 100 different disciplines, and write passably on topics of which we know nothing. Sometimes the strain shows, and a blogger with particular expertise in the poorly covered area will pounce on the shallow reporting. It's a pretty terrific corrective for us."

At its most aggressive, the blogging community asserts its intention to challenge the traditional media's role in shaping the policy agenda. As weblogger Dale Amon baldly expressed it, "I do not believe that the global media is going to shrivel up and die.... Someone has to go out and collect the raw data. What has changed is who makes the decision on what the data mean, what is important and to what use it should be put. That is now the niche of the blog."

That claim exaggerates weblogging's influence, at least for the present. But it is fair to say that to keep up with the discussion and latest analysis, one now needs to pay attention to the online debate and commentaries and not just what finds its way into print or on the TV screen.

Just as bloggers are watching us in the traditional media, we need to pay attention to them. The Internet is creating a new sensibility among many news-hungry readers. Newspaper and TV editorialists need to understand and respect that new way of approaching the policy discussion. They should also start thinking about how to respond to it.

NCEW member Geitner Simmons is an editorial writer with the Omaha World-Herald. Contact him at [e-mail]