Mary Jo Foley, the doyenne of Microsoft Watchers, has left Ziff Davis Media to pursue her own interests, namely writing about Microsoft as a blogger at ZDNet.

In a farewell interview, she says : “Blogging is the future of journalism, in my opinion. More and more bloggers are not just reacting to — but actually breaking — news. I wanted to try my hand at running a business that was blog-centric from the get-go. So I decided to take my show on the road.”

She’s right, of course, all the top newspaper titles have realized they can’t beat the online journalists for speed of reporting. That’s why they are increasingly taking a more expansive line on news through op-ed columns and magazine-type features.

But I think she should style herself a little differently, as a Web-based journalist and analyst.

Mary Jo is a serious journalist who’s broken many a MySoft story in the few years I wrote about them. Together with Robert Scoble, Ed Bott and less than a handful of other sources, she was the one you turned to when the big cataclysms struck Redmond.

[Original source]