Who’s your parasite?

As my three faithful readers know, I’m always peeved when bloggers are called parasites on the body of the fourth estate. The contention is that the press does all the hard work and the bloggers just link and smirk.

I’m offended because the press is itself, after all, a parasite on the other three estates, and the blogs are just an online embodiment of their collective (or factionalized) thought processes.

So I get a special chuckle (starting deep and ending in a cackle) when the press blatantly leeches on the hard work done by bloggers. As far as I can tell, the word blog was used seven times in this Sunday’s NYTimes, twice as the source for stories. How many stories from the paper did the bloggers quote Sunday?

Get the scoop on Philly from bloggers: “After weeks of frustrating obscurity, the case of Mr. Figueroa’s daughter, Latoyia Figueroa, 25, has finally captured the national news media’s attention, spurred by the persistent nudging of Philadelphia-based Web logs and a city councilman distantly related to the Figueroas.”

Or travel.