I woke up this morning to a N.Y. Times news alert that Swine Flu claimed its first American victim this morning.

Immediately, I opened a new window in my browser and typed in my new favorite news site for all things Swine Flu-related: Uncool Mom. I love that, through blogs, I can hear the nation’s hottest news from real people — people with stories and lives and opinions.

But maybe this is a good time for this conversation: how is blogging/citizen journalism/social media/whatever different than “journalism”? I mean, when I clicked on Uncoolmom.com this morning, I was looking for news, right? And the blog’s author is a freelance writer. So what’s the difference?

To read what I think the difference is, click the jump below.

Speaking as a journalist, a journalism student and a kid who grew up hearing that “newspapers are dying,” I’ve spent a lot of time debating the difference between citizen journalism (like what’s here on neighborsgo.com) and “real journalism,” like what you expect on dallasnews.com, and I’ve learned one thing:

Citizen journalism and professional journalism have one extremely important difference: editing.

I first heard this idea from the sports editor at ColumbiaMissourian.com, where I worked as a political and enterprise reporter. To be honest, when he first said it, I rolled my eyes. Just another old dude tryin’ to tell us tech-savvy kids what “is” and “isn’t” journalism, I thought.

But after four years writing as a journalist and as a blogger, I’ve learned he is dead on. The editing process at any news outlet is a massive undertaking. At the Missourian, our stories were read by assistant city editors, city editors, copy editors, and the copy editor’s editors. At night, before the paper was “put to bed,” or sent to the presses for production, as many as six copy editors huddled over a mark-up of the paper, reading each and every word, hoping to find that one mistake — a spelling error, a missing word, even an incorrect fact — trying to sneak into the paper.

By the time my stories were published, they were no longer “By Lindsay Toler.” I’d conducted the interviews and written the first drafts, but the final product turned out to be a collaborative effort among several reporters and editors, all using their expertise to make the story better.

It’s like putting a story into a furnace; all the weak stuff burns away and what’s left is journalism.