I've always thought that Helen Thomas was a vastly overrated hack of a reporter with an enormous sense of entitlement, and boy - she sure lives up to that with this little hissy fit:

“What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth. There’s a deterioration,” she continued.

Sigh. Here's the thing: Journalism just isn't that complicated. It involves paying attention, talking to as many people as you can reasonably get to for a story, and taking notes. Last time I looked, those are skills that you should have picked up by about 10th grade. The main thing that separates a major media journalist from a blogger is budget, not ethics and standards - I can't afford to hop a plane to cover, say, CES - the technology reporter for BusinessWeek (et. al.) can.

Which is not to say that there aren't bloggers doing reporting - there are. Some of what Scoble has done for PodTech is tech journalism, for instance, and I can't say that I see a major difference between how he does his thing and how the major media folks do theirs.

Those of us without travel budgets are usually doing more op/ed style writing than reporting, and we know that. I'm not at all sure that Helen Thomas understands the difference, though.