We the Media - retten Blogger den Journalismus?

--- In der allseits beliebten Reihe Mainstreammedien und Weblogs gibt es mal wieder einen Beitrag von der Bloggerseite her, dieses mal vom konservativen Instapundit Glenn Reynolds im Wall Street Journal:

The news business is in trouble. Readership and viewership are declining, public trust is plummeting, and advertisers are beginning to wonder whether they're getting their money's worth. This has led people to think about what blogger and tech journalist Doc Searls calls business models for "news without newspapers," an approach to reporting and disseminating news that doesn't depend on layers of editors for publication, and big ads from carmakers for funding. Nobody's sure just how to do that yet. That's likely to change, though. Already we're seeing a lot of reporting from nonjournalists, in which the "reporter" is just whoever happens to be on the scene, and online, when news happens. Given the ubiquity of digital cameras, cell phones, and wireless Internet access, that's likely to become more common, making the kind of distributed newsgathering seen during the Indian Ocean tsunami the norm, not the exception. Quite a few bloggers are moving beyond opinion journalism into firsthand reporting. On my own InstaPundit.com blog, I feature firsthand reports, often with photos, from places like Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. My "correspondents" are correspondents in the original sense--people who correspond--rather than in the modern sense of people with good hair and a microphone. Other bloggers have broken stories from Iraq (involving both alleged war crimes by U.S. troops and large antiterror marches left uncovered by American media), from the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and from Canada's government corruption scandals. Multimedia coverage is taking off, too. At the BlogNashville conference last month, I demonstrated the power of quick-and-dirty digital video by putting together a 15-minute Web documentary on the proceedings and posting it the next day, all done with the video-camera feature on my under-$300 Sony digital still camera. Now San Francisco blogger Bill Quick is using the same sort of equipment to cover local crime and politics. ... Pajamas Media, a blog-news venture I'm involved with, is recruiting a network of independent journalists around the world (and especially in less-democratic countries) and working on ways to support them financially, legally, and technologically. Others are working on news-aggregation technology that will automatically gather blog posts on particular topics, allowing people to customize their news.

Und sonst: Ursa Minor nimmt sich dem hierzulande noch weitgehend unentdeckten Downing Street Memo an -- es geht um neue Details der Absprachen und Irak-L�gen zwischen Bush und Blair im Rahmen der guten alten UKUSA-Allianz. Mehr dazu hier und hier.