> Which means that blogs aren't news sources.
I think there's lots of different kinds of blogs. The ones that I hear people complain about the most are those that "don't add value" (because they just link to someone else who links to someone else who, as Doug says, links to Reuters or AP) -- but I think they do, in the same way that most of the papers in the US (except the top 10 or so) do: they become a touchstone for people who want to know ... what's the news? It's a kind of subscription-to-a-filter.
Even in a place like San Francisco, the amount of locally-sourced material in the "local" paper is dwarfed by the amount of stuff that comes from the wires. But for the people who read the local paper, going somewhere else for the non-local news isn't as convenient.
And so goes many blogs: for whatever reason, they've created and retained an audience, even if the only thing they provide is a filter between what's "news" and what's "not news" ... *shrug*
> Today's argument is over the future of journalism ...
So ... I think it starts with broadcast TV: in opposition to the newspaper, you "can have it all for free" because they got the advertisers to pay for it indirectly. At some point in the 70s, the cable model created (on the false premise of 'no ads') a different approach, where you pay by subscription for the content.
So why isn't Comcast bundling subscriptions to online newspapers and magazines in their TV+Internet offering?
/jordan