A really nice column on the how the MSM needs bloggers and vice versa by Phil Boas, the deputy editorial page editor for The Arizona Republic: Bloggers: The light at the end of the newspaper's tunnel. Here is how it begins:

Engaged bloggers are voracious newspaper readers, too.

It's customary for anyone writing to the uninitiated about blogs to define them. This is a journalism trade publication and you are no ordinary reader, so I'll spare you the customary definition.

Instead, I'll define blogs as they relate to you.

They are your Nemesis in the making.

If you've remained nonplussed as they took down Dan Rather and four of his Black Rock colleagues, if you haven't the slightest interest in acquainting yourself with the blogosphere, don't move an inch. You won't have to. Bloggers will be knocking on your door any day now. Or knocking it down.

To many of you, bloggers are a presumptuous rabble—amateurs elbowing their way into the publishing world. You may not know them, but they know youyour face, your manners, your prejudices, your conceits.

They're your readers. And, God help us, they've become the one thing we've always begged them to become . . .

Engaged.

Here is how it ends:

If you listen closely, tuning in to the conversation beyond the oft-expressed contempt for mainstream media, you'll find the blogosphere actually needs mainstream media. We provide most of the coverage that starts the conversation. And by carrying the conversation further than we do, the blogosphere makes mass media vital.

The bloggers are demanding better standards and less bias—not unreasonable demands given journalism's current track record. But they're also creating stimulating and often irresistible discussion around the news we produce.

Journalism tomorrow, thanks to forces like the blogosphere, will grow more competitive. The best journalists will flourish. The mediocre will be exposed and washed out.

Everything in the middle is worth reading too, such as this:

We are headed to the Web in a big way, and our readers—especially our most engaged readers, the bloggers—are going with us. They are giving us a taste now of what our new environment will be like.

They will challenge and cajole us to confront our biases and our mistakes. And if we don't confront them, they'll clean our clocks.

They'll be our competitors and our colleagues and they'll force us to dig deeper into issues, think harder about them. They'll show us how to coalesce expertise on a breaking story and drill deeper for the more complete truth.

Whenever I blog about blogging, I often get an email insisting that bloggers need the MSM and are no replacement for it. I agree with this and this column, written to legacy journalists by a journalist, describes the symbiotic relationship between the MSM and blogging as succinctly as I have seen. (Hat tip Little Green Footballs and a commentator on Roger L. Simon who led me to LGF)