John Bethel submits: Tom Glocer (pictured), CEO of Reuters, writes a thoughtful opinion column in the Financial Times on blogging and such:

Conservative estimates suggest 80,000 new blogging sites are launched every week. David Miliband will soon be the first British cabinet minister to have his own blog site.

But it is not just bloggers – it is citizen journalists armed with their 1.3 megapixel camera phones, people “mashing” together music and images to create new music videos, kids making their own movies and posting them on sites such as Stupidvideos.com or MySpace.com.

He even notes that the role bloggers play isn’t new. But some things are:

It is important to understand what has changed. Bloggers, after all, have always been a part of history – read Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys or James Boswell. The same is true for citizen journalists: just check out first-hand accounts of any big historical event. The difference now is the scale of distribution and the ability to search.

The columns ends with these three paragraphs:

You have to be open to both amateur and professional content to tell the story completely. I believe that professional articles and photographs, if available, will generally be authoritative. But, in the first instance, they can be complemented by content created by amateurs.

We are now at our crossroads. Old media – and I now would include the first wave of online publishing – have a choice: integrate the new world or risk becoming less relevant. Our industry must not fall into the old protectionist strategies that defined the first phase of the internet. The internet was not invented just to show a replica of yesterday’s newspaper with a few banner advertisements. We cannot be the choke-hold, blocking the new creators in a bid to protect our legacy businesses.

There is no doubt that our businesses will be stronger if we employ a more collective and open-minded approach to content. The media world is changing again. It is becoming far more exciting for the consumer but posing challenges for media businesses. We all now have access to a rich world of new content creators. The trick is how we use that opportunity.

Keep in mind, this blog is about stock picking — not journalism. But it’s an insightful piece by the head of a mainstream media company.