Next fall, a handful of students at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism will convene weekly to learn about blogging from John Batelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine, and Paul Grabowicz, the school's new media program director.
Students will create a weblog devoted to copyright issues, from "deep-linking" to online music trading. They'll also debate whether blogs are "a sensible medium for doing journalism, and what does that mean?" said Grabowicz, who contributes to the Poynter Institute's online media blog.
(A blog is, to oversimplify, a constantly updated combination of diary and link collection.)
The Berkeley class on blogging is the latest in a series of signs that the media establishment is starting to warm up to what was long seen as legitimate journalism's loud-mouthed kid sister.
MSNBC, for example, recently joined Fox News, Slate, the San Jose Mercury News and others by adding blogs to its website.
"This means that professional journalists aren't just poking at bloggers like creatures in a zoo cage -- they're in the cage themselves," said John Hiler, editor of Microcontent News, a site keeping tabs on the blogging world.
But the new embrace is making many bloggers squirm.
"Mark my words, this (Berkeley class) is going to be the Altamont of the blogging movement," Sean Kirby posted on the Daily Pundit blog.
He added in an e-mail, "Teaching of blogging in journalism school signals an end of an era, a movement from blogging being separate from the old media, to it being appropriated by the media establishment."
To Jonathon Delacour, this establishment treats bloggers like a "vast pool of unpaid researchers who do a lot of leg work while the journalist gets the kudos in mainstream society and gets paid."
Added Delacour, whose site covers, in a single day, everything from the World Cup to XML to Mahayana Buddhism, "It's a master-servant relationship."
For some in the mainstream press, the sour feelings are mutual. To these traditional reporters, like the Boston Globe's Alex Beam, blogs are an "infinite echo chamber of self-regard," as he wrote in a recent column, "(a) medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow 'blogger,' no matter how outré, goes unpraised."
Despite this, a number of schools, including USC's Annenberg School for Communication, will include blogging in their online journalism classes in the fall. And senior bloggers, like Dave Winer and Ken Layne, have recently given talks both Cal and Stanford.
Teachers at every level from elementary school to MBA are trying to bring blogs into their classrooms. They're finding the most success when they use the blog as a "classroom management tool" -- a way to broadcast homework assignments, keep parents informed, and provide links to research materials, said Sarah Lohnes, an educational technology specialist at Middlebury College in Vermont.
But efforts to get students to participate in classroom blogs have, for the most part, fallen flat.
Contributing to the blog will be required in Grabowicz's Berkeley class.
And students won't be allowed to just submit "a list of links that some bot could generate." Nor can it "degenerate into 'my personal feelings,' which is not professional journalism," Grabowicz said.
The intellectual-property issues the Berkeley class will try to sift through are particularly important to the blogging community, because a weblog site's combination of liberally used links and off-the-cuff commentary make it a juicy target for corporate lawsuits.
"We're probably only six months away from seeing a blogger served with a libel lawsuit," Microcontent News' Hiler said.
But despite the timeliness of the issues, many bloggers are wondering whether their craft can be taught in journalism school at all.
Ken Layne, blogger and veteran Los Angeles journalist, said the course "sounds useful," but "it will have to be the complete opposite of the J-school learning process, which works at a snail's pace. You can't sit around talking ethics before typing a line."
Will Richardson, who runs a website chronicling the use of blogs in the classroom, added, "Do they need it to train professional journalists? I don't know about that."
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