Robert Fuller is back in Berkeley, bearing pictures from YearlyKos. Here’s a summary of his thoughts on the gathering:

YearlyKos was not exactly a passing of the torch from traditional to Internet journalists-there remains a need for books, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV-but it was certainly the acknowledgement by the former of the latter as co-equal members of the indispensable Fourth Estate. If a democracy needs a free and vigilant press to hold government accountable, then the traditional media that historically played that role need the new Internet journalists to hold it accountable. The Romans used to ask “Who guards the guardians?” The analogous questions for media are “Who watches the watchers?”, “Who chronicles the chroniclers?”

The emergent Blogosphere provides an answer. A swarm of bloggers can force the media to live up to the standards of integrity taught in journalism schools or depicted in movies like Good Night and Good Luck. At YearlyKos, 1000 bloggers assembled for the first time and a few famous traditional journalists wrote about the phenomenon with a mixture of condescension and respect. It’s hard to imagine democracy making the evolutionary step to a dignitarian society,
without this new breed of watchdogs that has found a home in the Blogosphere.

While at YearlyKos, Fuller hung out with the Link TV crew as they video-blogged the event.