Will Blogs Replace Newspapers?

[Jason Salas]
"Newspapers are a dying medium. They have been for the last several years, and it's only going to get worse. [...] The rise in blogging applications and the millions of people flocking to use them, serving as ad hoc reporters, has already blurred the definition of what a traditional professional in our beloved field is. [...] blogs have matured from a tool of the nerd to a dependable source of information. [...] Bloggers [have the] opportunity to be as scathing or critical as they wish, as opposed to paid reporters that still have to subscribe to ethics, journalistic integrity, and the responsibility of being a good representative of the company employing them. [...] They can't be held responsible for verifying, or criticized for getting something wrong."

It's hard to disagree with such a convoluted and self-contradicting set of statements like this but I'm going to give it a shot.

Newspapers are a dying medium. However, blogging will not be the cause of its death nor will blogs replace newspapers as the primary source of news for a majority of the world's population. Fair and balanced journalism is good journalism. When I seek out the news, I don't read Robert Novak or whoever his counterpart on the left is. I certainly don't tune my monitor to a blog. Instead, I read the Associated Press or the Christian Science Monitor.

On the whole, individual bloggers will never consistently produce the kind of original, highly refined, unbiased content that even small town newspaper readers have come to expect and value. However, the thought energy that bloggers put into their "reporting" and news aggregation efforts can and will be leveraged by other participatory media like WikiNews and will therefore contribute to and hasten the demise of the newpaper medium. Of course, it's also possible that the newspaper medium will survive by aggregating good content from blogs...