Who's a Hobby Hack?

I was thinking about Nick Coleman's widely trashed tantrum against bloggers in the Star Tribune:

I have been a reporter longer than most bloggers have been alive, which makes me, at 54, ready for the ash heap. But here's what really makes bloggers mad: I know stuff.

I covered Minneapolis City Hall, back when Republicans controlled the City Council. I have reported from almost every county in the state, I have covered murders, floods, tornadoes, World Series and six governors.

In other words, I didn't just blog this stuff up at midnight.

Nick thinks that bloggers, on the other hand, are know-nothing hacks:

Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.

I though about this, when I did my last post, about how numerous major newspapers, including the NYT and the LAT, told us that a Federal District Judge just struck down part of the Patriot Act. But according to one of these sad loner, hobby hack bloggers, the papers got it all wrong, the law that had been struck down had been on the books since 1986.

The "sad loner" blogger in question is a George Washington University Law Professor Orin Kerr, graduate of Harvard Law School, who had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Kennedy and worked as a Federal Prosecutor before starting his academic career.

Now tell me Nick, and be honest. Who is more qualified to inform us about the significance and impact of this judicial decision, a credentialed journalist like yourself with your vast experience covering floods and stuff, or a legal scholar like Professor Kerr? (And Kerr doesn't even cost us anything! Hah!)