Yesterday I wrote about journalist and science blogger Ed Yong's unfortunate run-in with the kind of anachronistic journalism dinosaur that will be extinct one day soon - a PIO who resents blogging.

I didn't rehash the work of others who covered points about respect and in general not being an idiot to writers with a large audience - as I said then, the PIOs I have gotten to know have all been terrific so I had no frame of reference.   My concern was that particular PIOs criticism of other PIOs who simply do the job they are paid to do - engage the media world and get us all interested in their university's research.   You know, the word public in Public Information Officer.    The whole thing seems to be over now; the PIO wrote Yong privately and Yong would like it to be over and that is that.
  
Well, not quite.    Deborah Blum at PLoS Blogs, a Pulitzer prize winner and so no stranger to quality work, takes the opportunity to defend blogging as a medium:

I am smart enough to recognize a blaze of talent and good journalism when I see it. I acknowledge that we’re still in an evolutionary period in journalism – painful for many of my generation. It’s not only public information officers who dismiss – or angst about – bloggers. Last October, as you may remember, the editor of the journal Analytical Chemistry went off into a rant about blogs and the future of science education and communication.