James Boyce, skipping the expected Bowers’ profile for his Meet the Blogger series, writes up Jerome Armstrong…

And what about now? Have you seen any estimates that you think might be right? Some say there are a million people out there - some say more, others less? What’s it like being a blogger in this sort of landscape?

A recent Gallup poll showed that nearly 30% of people that go onto the internet have read blogs. So blogging is becoming more of a part of society. In the past year, at least as concerns politics, there’s been tremendous growth of blog readers at the local level. I don’t know the exact number, I’d estimate that there’s about 3-5 million in the blog community on the progressive side, and we’ve got an agenda to change the direction of this country, so hopefully we’ll be able to grow that number a few fold this decade.

With the increased growth, there’s been more exposure and legitimacy to individual bloggers, blogads have helped pay a bit for the work, and some bloggers have been able to work on campaigns. However, the political establishment in power wants to stop things like transparency and accountability from happening, so it’s not going to be easy to change the system. I’m just a voice among the millions that realizes the direction of this nation must change. I don’t always get it right, and certainly have made my mistakes, but I’m willing to listen, learn, and change. And God knows there’s always a critic out there willing to step up to that task.

That dynamic feedback is loop one of the great things about the open blogosphere that makes the community authentic. One of the things that you find as a blogger is that not everyone is going to like every move you make, and there will be those that are always looking for an opportunity to criticize–you get thick skin in this world.

Mary Mapes, the CBS producer fired for her role in the Bush National Guard documents story, discusses the very important fact that those documents have never been proven to be forgeries, despite what you read in the press…

The laundry list of problems that critics claimed they saw in the memos has turned out to be bunk. There never has been any definitive proof that they were forged or falsified in any way, despite a multi-million dollar investigation into the story by Viacom. The reasons we put them on the air remain valid: the content of the memos was corroborated by people familiar with Bush, his unit and his commander; the dates, times and details intricately matched what we know of the record; and two experienced and respected document analysts, who examined copies that had not been faxed or digitally recreated, concluded that the papers showed every indication of being real.

I don’t believe we will know the truth about the memos until after the Bush team is out of office and people with information are no longer afraid to come forward.

Viacom, CBS’s parent company, never did care whether the story was true or not. They just wanted rid of it. Among other things, they had multiple issues pending before the FCC and various other arms of the administration and our story was no help to the company in its quest to squeeze every last dime out of what used to be the public airwaves. Firing longtime employees in an attempt to get back into the administration’s good graces was simply a business decision. It had nothing to do with journalism or the crucial role that critical reporting is supposed to play in American democracy.