Gov. Paul LePage doesn’t like the media much.

LePage’s antipathy toward journalists goes beyond the general distaste often expressed by members of the tea party for the “lamestream press.” The governor has condemned Maine newspapers in general and has singled out specific reporters as having peddled lies about his administration, although he hasn’t explained exactly what lies he’s referring to.

Recently, he lashed out at a group of reporters for failing to get his side of the story on the resignation of Department of Marine Resources Commissioner Norman Olsen, even though many had actually quoted LePage or his spokesman in their coverage.

But what LePage seems to dislike even more than full-time journalists are bloggers.

Last week, the Sunlight Foundation, an organization dedicated to increasing government transparency, published a letter it received from LePage on official state letterhead that can perhaps best be described as snippy.

LePage’s missive objected to the group’s portrayal of him as being anti-sunlight in his dealings with corporate leaders, and declared that, “For the record, I do not have nor ever had a business advisory committee.”

What LePage neglected to mention (and what the foundation pointed out on its blog) is that he tried to set up such an advisory panel and to exempt it from the state’s freedom of access laws, but gave up his plans after pushback from politicians, pundits, the press and the public.

But what really makes LePage’s letter noteworthy is the last line, where he dismissively states, “Some of you folks read too many blogs.”

The letter, of course, got blogged all over the place.

If LePage really is anti-weblog, he likely will not be happy with a recent move by the Bangor Daily News. The paper has just brought on board Matthew Gagnon, Republican activist and a former staffer for Sen. Susan Collins staffer, and Amy Fried, University of Maine political science professor, to add some new blood to its opinions page. Gagnon and Fried are both bloggers.

Gagnon writes Pine Tree Politics, a conservative blog that I enjoy thoroughly and have been agreeing with way too much lately; Fried recently began Pollways.com, where she discusses polling and politics.

As a blogger myself, now writing a column, I like to think I paved the way for both of them. You’re welcome, guys.

Last week, both writers published their inaugural columns on the same subject: the people’s veto of the elimination of election day voter registration.

To vastly oversimplify things, Fried argued that there’s no reason to eliminate same-day registration, so it should be kept; Gagnon argued that there’s no reason to keep it, so it should go. Usually, this kind of conflict would be contained to a few column-inches in the back of the newspaper’s A section, but with both writers running their own online printing presses, this particular disagreement has gone a bit farther.

I think this kind of writing heralds great things for people who like to follow politics in Maine, especially those like me who apparently read too many blogs. This kind of extension of newspaper content into the online realm, not done out of a desire to get revenue from page views or as part of an attempt to preserve a threatened model of journalism, but simply out of a desire to have more conversation, more broadly, is a wonderful thing.

While bloggers move into print, traditional journalists and pundits are moving in the other direction. It’s a rare reporter these days who doesn’t have a blog, a Twitter stream and an active Facebook profile (and now, for the cool kids, a Google+ account).

The past decade saw a great deal of handwringing about how bloggers might undercut journalism or traditional opinion writing. Thankfully, we seem to be mostly past that now. It’s hard to tell where the line is any more and readers seem to be better able to evaluate information objectively, no matter what the source. While that may not be a good thing for the traditional model of journalism, it almost certainly is for the general expansion and democratization of public discourse.

In a few more years, LePage’s statement about reading “too many blogs” won’t just be snippy, it may be meaningless, along the lines of saying “too much journalism.”

Mike Tipping is a political junkie. He writes the Tipping Point blog on Maine politics at DownEast.com, his own blog at MainePolitics.net and works for the Maine People’s Alliance and the Maine People’s Resource Center. He’s @miketipping on Twitter. Email [email protected]