As Vincent Maher noted yesterday in Tidbits, blogs can be a good source of leads, investigation, and even breaking news that the mainstream media can pick up on and amplify. (Even though news orgs often neglect to credit blogs for their work.)

However, I think the more common and more important way that blogs can complement mainstream journalism is this: Blogs (and their reader communities) can -- and often do -- perform follow-up reporting on stories that mainstream journalists hint at, but don't pursue.

Today, blogger Tom Evslin described a great example of bloggers and their communities running with a story that New York Times tech columnist and blogger David Pogue mentioned only in passing. Their follow-up produced thorough, distributed, cross-linked coverage of a company called FuturePhone, which offers free overseas phone calls.

Admittedly, what they uncovered about FuturePhone's business model is of interest only to a niche audience. However, niche news is real news -- and it can be extremely valuable to the people who want it.

In his Oct. 9 posting Free Overseas Phone Calls, Pogue briefly mentioned Future Phone -- admitting that he hadn't done any digging. Evslin's post describes and links to discussion and speculation that started in the comments to Pogue's posting and then spread into actual investigation elsewhere.

The results of that group investigative effort were published by Evslin, Alec Saunders,  and other bloggers, each probing different aspects of the story. Comments played a crucial journalistic role in the coverage -- raising questions, supplying information, fact-checking, etc.

This is an excellent example of news collaboration -- something I've written about before on Tidbits and Contentious, and which I'd like to see a lot more of.

But news organizations shouldn't just leave distributed reporting to citizen journalists.

If you can see past the competitive myopia that's endemic to the culture of many mainstream news organizations, there are lots of opportunities for "competitors" to collaborate on coverage in ways that leverage unique strengths and resources, thus yielding a larger audience (read: ad dollars) for all involved. Giving credit, offering live links, and even working out joint publishing strategies for certain stories might ultimately become strategies to build audience loyalty. As long as everyone involved is clear about who did what reporting, such collaborative efforts might even strengthen news brands -- rather than undermine them.

I realize this is a controversial proposal in mainstream media circles. I'm not dissing competition entirely. Competition has indeed fostered much good journalism.

But, as the FuturePhone coverage indicates, competition is not the only way to approach reporting and publishing news. In fact, in some cases (especially with shrinking newsroom staffs and budgets) an overly competitive mindset might even be getting in the way of better journalism -- and better business for news organizations.

(Thanks to Larry Larsen for the tip.)