The Los Angeles Times again has a columnist who just doesn’t get it.

This time it’s Bill Dwyre’s turn to say something stupid.

We blog before we report, when it should be the other way around.

We write more about ourselves than we do about our subjects. We have Facebook and YouTube, and we see the world as being all about us, on all topics, every day. News isn’t news unless we agree with it.

Let’s settle this once and for all: blogging is just a tool. That’s all it is. You can have a just-the-facts blog or you can have a just-opinions blog — just like written content in a newspaper.

We have reporters and columnists. Bloggers can be either one — or both.

The smart papers do blog before they report — if you take “report” in the sense that a 62-year-old reason why the Times is the Titanic of newspapers like Dwyre wants you to believe. He’s one of those people that believes news can only be “reported” in the printed pages or with a traditional news story.

The smart news companies (the LA Times is firmly a newsPAPER) report in whatever manner makes the most sense. News breaks? They have a breaking news blog, they use twitter, they use something — anything — more immediate than a full-fledged 15-inch story (or 30 in many cases).

News organizations that get it report as news breaks. They inform readers when they know the facts, but they don’t wait until they have a traditional news story, because the traditional way of reporting news is the old way — the wrong way — to report on the Web.

And we should be using social sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc to help connect with your audience, to help be apart of the community and to have a conversation.

When you look at the papers doing the worst, you know why. It’s because the top people just don’t get it. They think they own the news.

No one owns the news.