Is blogging really journalistic suicide?

I always liked the Health Care Blog, but I certainly didn't always agree with Matthew Holt. In today's post, he writes the following:

PHARMA/BLOGS: Jim Edwards torpedoes own career!

Some of the best reporting on the pharma business in the last few years has come not from the mainstream press but from Jim Edwards, a reporter buried in the marketing industry trade press at Brandweek. Given the fact that certain Manhattan-based major press publications could use to improve their pharma and health care journalism (and I’m not talking about the WSJ, think more of dogs and sores!), I was hoping and expecting to get an email one day from Jim telling me of his new gig.

But instead, he’s decided to not only stay at BrandWeek but also to commit journalistic suicide and become one of us. His new blog is called BrandweekNRX. Pity. But I look forward to reading it!

I couldn't agree more about how Jim Edwards has written lots of stuff that really should be in the New York Times, and not hidden in Brandweek, but I also couldn't disagree more that Jim, or for that matter Ed Silverman, are committing journalistic suicide.

First there were books, then newspapers, then radio and film and then finally television. Now there are blogs. Matthew Holt, if anyone, should understand how the universe works and evolves. It doesn't mean Ed or Jim will succeed as bloggers, but they have just as good a chance as anyone else.

The difference between them and Matt is that he can blog for as long as he cares, Ed and Jim will have to attract enough readers for their corporate parents to continue to pay them to do this.