This NYT piece looks at how liberal bloggers are trying to build relationships with the MSM to see more of their news filter up.

Some excerpts:

Even as online pundits criticize traditional news organizations as slow, biased and technologically challenged, a group of bloggers is trying to use old-fashioned telephone conference calls to share their ideas with newspaper and television journalists.

The bloggers, who describe themselves as liberal or progressive, say the conference calls are intended to counter what they regard as the much stronger influence of conservative pundits online. Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, the host of the two calls so far, views them as a step toward getting their reports out to mainstream news organizations.

While there is no way to know precisely who dialed in, reporters from news organizations including CBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, MSNBC and The National Journal asked for a call-in number, according to one participant.

"We hope to build a bridge," Mr. Fertik said, adding that different bloggers would be invited to share their reporting on each call. "We hope that good credible stories that are broken on the Internet find their way into coverage in the mainstream media."

Here's one MSM journo's take on the calls:

Will Femia, a producer at MSNBC.com who monitors blogging, said he was surprised by how well that call worked. "It was a fascinating idea," he said, "and I would also say that it's not a bad idea to try something like that. I know that the news producers that I've spoken with are still engaged in a learning curve on how to extract news from blogs."

Mr. Femia, who sometimes presents ideas based on bloggers' postings, said he was not sure exactly how stories made the transition. "I don't know what the tipping point is," he said, adding that some reporters clearly checked blogs for ideas.

These thoughts on the importance of "teamwork" to amplify what blogs are saying mirror what I've often argued:

Mr. (Jack) Balkin (of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School) said that building the influence of a particular Web site requires more than simply expressing conservative views online or taking on a broadcast journalist like Dan Rather. What matters is the willingness of like-minded people to establish links to that Web site, to drive more traffic there, and of yet other like-minded people in traditional news organizations, in talk radio and on television to draw on it.

"It's a team effort," Mr. Taylor of FreeRepublic.com said. "We feed off each other, because the radio hosts would have information that we didn't have and then we would post that." In the early days of FreeRepublic, meetings with politicians and other offline efforts helped get word of the site out, too.