This research explores how news bloggers and mainstream news journalists discursively constructed the doxa of journalism, as well as their own efforts to reinscribe their activities as being positioned inside or outside of journalistic boundaries, at a moment of crisis. The study found a recurrent reflexive protectionism displayed by journalists who actively reinscribed their work as journalistic, while bloggers readily explored the extent of journalism practice, albeit through a politicized lens. If the boundaries of journalism are measured, in part, by the ascribed doxic values on display, rather than the reinscribed performance of journalism values, then bloggers emerged from this controversy as participating within the journalistic field - admittedly quite complicated and politically influenced, but as journalists nonetheless.