The past few months have brought a series of debates over whether bloggers are or can ever be considered journalists and how digital media is or is not destroying quality journalism.

This summer’s examples include Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Publisher Walter E. Hussman’s May op-ed that appeared in The Wall Street Journal headlined “How to Sink a Newspaper.” In August, Elon University Prof. Michael Skube wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, which raised dozens of prominent bloggers’ hackles. Many of those bloggers helped New York University Prof. Jay Rosen crowd-sourced a “blowback” piece for The Los Angeles Times through Rosen’s blog. In addition, Google’s July aunch of verified comments on news articles and a subsequent, misunderstood editorial about it drew some debate.

Through these individual debates, a more overarching question has emerged: Are these conversations worth the effort they take?

BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote recently, “It’s just so tiring. Everything has been said. … Enough already. Can we move on? Please?”

Yesterday, LostRemote blogger Steve Safran wrote:

I’m as tired as Jeff of the “newspapers vs. bloggers” debate, yet the hand-wringing keeps coming up in conference after conference. The newspapers (”We brought down Nixon!”) and the bloggers (”We brought down Dan Rather!”) need to stop seeing this as a vs. argument. Jarvis put it well in response to an audience member’s point that newspapers do the legwork and bloggers only comment: “All I can say is that I look forward to a conference where we don’t have this argument and we talk about the possibilities of what we can do together.

Earlier this summer, Safran wrote a long blog entry about how “vs. thinking” brings everyone down.

I agree with Jarvis on the second half of his comment: I’m also looking forward to talking more about what bloggers and mainstream media outlets can do together. This is a lot of what happened at the Journalism That Matters sessions in Washington earlier this month. (See the related Digital Edge blog entries for more.)

But we also need to have these “vs. thinking” conversations (Safran’s term there). Having those conversations is a necessary evil – a sometimes frustrating and tiring but integral part of bringing bloggers and mainstream media folks to the point where we can have those conversations about the opportunities and possibilities. I’m not sure the majority of bloggers or mainstream media people are at that point yet, so it’s really too early to tire of the conversation.