Apparently, the admission of new media news organizations into the Washington D.C. press pool has raised some objections among traditional media outlets.

There will inevitably be some friction as online news organizations, which may or may not be bound by the same professed standards of objectivity, begin taking on the responsibilities of long-standing print publications.

That’s been apparent this week, as White House reporters have privately discussed and debated the recent addition of sites like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post to the White House in-town press pool. It’s not that reporters are criticizing the work of either Christina Bellantoni or Sam Stein, but some have expressed concerns about pool reports coming from left- or right-leaning news organizations that will then be used by the rest of the press corps.

“This is really troubling,” said New York Times reporter Peter Baker in an e-mail to POLITICO. “We’re blurring the line between news and punditry even further and opening ourselves to legitimate questions among readers about where the White House press corps gets its information.”

Baker said he has no problem with outlets like Huffington Post, which he described “an important part of the marketplace of ideas.” But the site, he said, has a mission “to produce pieces with strongly argued points of view” and that puts the Times — or other nonpartisan news organizations — “in a position of relying on overtly ideological or opinionated organizations as our surrogate news gatherers.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Weisman said that he doesn’t “feel strongly either way” about HuffPost and TPM joining but has asked WHCA President Ed Chen to call a meeting so correspondents can air things out. Weisman added in an e-mail that “with the two new additions to the pool rotation coming so fast, I think it would be good to get a broader consensus among correspondents.”

Both Chen, of Bloomberg News, and USA Today Vice President David Jackson said they’ve received questions from members of the pool in recent days and may hold a public meeting in the future to discuss the issue. The last open meeting, when TPM was let in, took place on Oct. 15. (Before another, the WHCA board needs to meet first, and that won’t be until early next year.)

It seems that some in the press corps treat new media outlets like Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the reality-show wanna-bes who crashed the White House last week. But sites are filling the void left by the dwindling press corps. New Media does not want to usurp journalism from the reporters, we aim to enhance the profession. Hopefully traditional outlets will realize the tools that lie in new media. Or they can dismiss the service that organizations like watchdog.org and the Franklin Center provide–at their own peril.