Michael Lenehan, executive editor of the Chicago Reader, in Friday’s edition says (PDF) that the “traditional newspaper business is going to hell” amid the rise of the blogosphere. “Circulation’s down, ad revenue’s down, jobs are vanishing everywhere you look,” he wrote. The cause? The Internet.

Sites such as Craigslist, eBay and Google Base have sapped newspapers’ traditional classified advertising revenues, while bloggers divert people away from the actual news agencies reporting the news, he writes.

Lenehan also decries the lack of respect bloggers show for the “mainstream media.”

“I noticed that, according to Wonkette, the news story that inspired her fulminations had come from Yahoo, via Sploid,” Lenehan wrote. “Nowhere does Wonkette betray even the vaguest awareness of the person who actually reported the story or even the ‘mainstream media’ that disseminated it.”

Lenehan has a valid criticism here. Yahoo is not a news organization. It syndicates news from the Associated Press, Reuters, and other actual news organizations, but does no reporting of its own. Citing Yahoo as the source of a story is highly inappropriate. “The stories are just . . . out there,” Lenehan writes, and for all the awareness certain bloggers have of mainstream media, that may well in their eyes be true.

Almost no bloggers are actually going out and doing real journalism: developing their own unique stories from their own networks of carefully cultivated sources and their own research and investigation. What bloggers do — and do well — is commentary and analysis, the sort of thing you might see on the editorial and op-ed pages.

Indeed, for the most part, that’s what I do here, though I am slowly developing my own sources and I am often able to add information gained from my own research, investigation and reporting to “mainstream” reporting.

So Lenehan has, with tongue (I hope) firmly planted in cheek, called for all journalists to take a year off and do no reporting. “Let’s see if Wonkette can deal with the devious bastards in the executive branch any better than Judith Miller did. Let’s have some of those citizen journalists call Burt Natarus and see if they can figure out what the hell he’s talking about,” he wrote.

Some would, some would not.

I’m not looking forward to a “Year Without Journalism,” as the mainstream media still plays a critical role in American society, and We the Blogosphere need to acknowledge and respect that. We already do our own op-ed; we need to be prepared to do our own reporting as well.