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Burson-Marsteller CEO Mark Penn's latest byline for The Wall Street Journal has been picking up some buzz today, after he called professional bloggers "America's Newest Profession."

Penn says 452,000 bloggers cite it as their primary source of income and even links back to mediabistro's own GalleyCat blog. The 452k number puts bloggers ahead of computer programmers, CEOs and firefighters in terms of total jobs.

Scott Rosenberg, cofounder of Salon and author of "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters," disagrees with Penn's numbers. "The methodology of Penn's piece seems to be: gather as many numbers as you can and don't worry about the fact that they are from many different sources at different times using different methodologies and even differing definitions of what it means to "be a blogger" - just toss them all together and start drawing conclusions," he wrote in a post on his Wordyard blog today.