Debate slops back and forth about what blogs do to raze or raise journalism. I look at from an eat-to-survive standpoint.

I edit for a living. Editors take raw copy and cook it.

I’m pretty good at it — and don’t know much else. My cabinet has certain spices and styles I favor, just like everyone else. (I can’t stand it when writers use “impact” as a verb, for example.) Throwing those grammatical spices into a dish of raw copy gives me a thrill and pays the bills.

Can you smell the sweet aroma?

Think about it: Millions of pages of raw copy are posted to the Internet daily.

Tasty.

The smart news organizations will be the feeding troughs — or perhaps buffets, since blog flavors vary. Some blogs just aren’t journalism. On others, I’ve seen reporting that beats anything out there.

There’s enough journalistic, well-written and fair prose out there to keep editors’ tables full for a long time to come. The question is, will news producers bring the plate?