It's possible as blogging becomes more visible reporters won't be needed - or will only be needed in very hard to reach areas.
That depends. If they continue to play to their weaknesses (political analysis tea leaf reading, recycled press releases, manufactured stories, incessant (and unattributed!) plagiarism - sorry, "syndication" and copy-pasted Reuters newsfeeds) instead of playing to their strengths (access to institutions, the ability to dispatch correspondents worldwide on short notice, large and varied archives(!) and the ability to force confrontations with insiders), then they will lose relevance, influence and, not to put too fine a point upon it, raison d'etre.
But if they play to their strengths instead of their weaknesses, they will play an important part of the media landscape throughout this iteration of democracy.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
the ability to force confrontations with insiders
And for that matter, you can add providing an institutional framework for whistleblowing. While whistleblowers could hypothetically contact - say - DailyKos, the blogosphere has precious little history of dealing with whistleblowers, and it just takes one security cock-up to make life really miserable for a guy who takes on - say - Volkswagen or ThyssenKrupp.
The really sad thing is that the broadcast media have already largely surrendered two of these critical strengths. If the entire press goes "ooh, shiny!" whenever a spin doctor feeds a press release to a tame newsie, its ability to keep its eyes on the ball long enough to support whistleblowers and force confrontations with insiders is seriously compromised (to put it nicely...). And the salient point here is that blogs and other grassroot media can't - at least in their present form - replace those aspects of the broadcast media.
More exotic places don't necessarily have convenient infrastructure - yet.
The idea of blogging is relatively new, and the idea of news blogging is even newer. Just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it's not possible.
And I'm not completely convinced by the whistleblower points. Hasn't Wikileaks been doing exactly this?
The move to blogging doesn't just mean a move away from one-to-many media - it means a move away from passive spoonfeeding of editorial narratives, and of the idea of the Inherent Personal Authority of reportage and editorial.
That's a good thing, because a multiplicity of independent sources improves the overall quality of news reporting.
It's a bad thing if you want to make a policy point and have people support you, because first you have to find an audience, and then you have to keep their attention for long enough to create democratic pressure - all of which will become harder.
But it can be done. At the moment the European right is doing it more successfully than the left is. The left is leading in the US.
But that only proves that it can be effective.
