I will be in Nashville this weekend, attending the meeting of the Media Bloggers Association. (The image is from a cool Brazilian blog I found, apparently written by a 16-year old.)

Before I could pack, leader Robert Cox sent me a list of new applicants for membership. Given the fact I felt my own journalistic credentials were under a microscope for months, waiting for his yea-or-nay (turned out I was lost in the shuffle) and given my own recent mistakes here, I was loathe to pass on the qualifications of others.

Generally, my opinion in the past was that the market decided who should be a journalist, and who was "just" a blogger. But that may not be right. After all, bloggers can go on-and-on until they exhaust themselves, and much journalism is subsidized by politicians, so that the requirement to lie becomes a lifestyle, and the liars become institutions whose credentials no one can question. Robert Novak is a journalist only because he's paid to play one on TV.

But then came news from Reporters Without Borders that 53 journalists died last year trying to report the news. That's paid journalists, real journalists, reporters, editors and publishers.

They died in Iraq, they died in Bangladesh, they died in Sri Lanka and the Phillippines, which claims to have great press freedom. They died in Latin America and in Africa, too.

Death is just one hazard. Jail is another. Ruinous lawsuits are a third. The last two bedevil many journalists in this country.

It should go without saying that bloggers are now facing these hazards, for real. Bloggers have been arrested and thrown in jail in Iran and in China, for doing the work print journals are forbidden to do. The people who run two Apple-related blogs could still face contempt of court jail time for refusing to disclose who leaked trade secrets to them.

I was taught in j-school that these are hazards of the trade, hazards we should be proud to face. This is the difference between those who do journalism and those who just pretend to, the willingness to face real pain. Real publishers must also be willing to run these risks, or else they should put their money into restaurants, stocks and bonds. Publishers may not share our ethics, but they share our hazards.

After I finished I had to ask myself. How many of these fine people would really hazard those risks? I know some would. I'm certain others might say they would, but would not. And it's a question I can neither answer for them nor judge.

If you blog, I want you to look inside your heart and answer truthfully, now, whether you would, whether you really would? Would you risk death, risk jail, risk ruin for what you write? Because many, even in the journalism profession itself, make a great show of running risks but would not, not really, if faced with the choice between work and death.

Right now this is just a theoretical question. You may exhale.

But what if it weren't?