More blogs vs the media

This time on Fox News. Quite a well-balanced piece I think, here are some edits:

"The "blogosphere" isn’t so much an alternative to the conventional
newsstand as it is a massive extension of it. There are well-edited,
well-researched, well-written blogs and there are poorly edited, poorly
written, gossip-driven blogs, just as your roadside newsstand carries
publications ranging from The Economist to the Weekly World News."

I like the extension message, since clearly bloggers can debate issues in more detail and from a variety of angles. This is a much more collaborative approach, where each enhances the other, rather than polices it. The article wraps up with this extract, which to my mind explains the situation well:

“Blogging’s comparative advantage is that it’s cheap and it’s easy to take up. A good blog also doesn’t need the readership a magazine or newspaper needs to survive. The result is a significant expansion of the scope, breadth and depth of public discourse. Good blogs will rise to the top. That means new voices, new perspectives and new reporting. These are things to be celebrated in a free society.

But let’s not fetishize blogging, either. There’s no reason to think that these new voices will be inherently more or less flawed than the mainstream media voices we’ve been hearing for generations. There will be good and bad bloggers just as there are good and bad reporters, magazines, newspapers and opinion journals.
 
In the case of bloggers, there will just be a heck of a lot more of them.”