well i'd repeat that mainstream news organizations are creating news in blog form. with remarkable speed it's changing the actual format of news on the web in mainstream outlets. in a way this is a key moment because the blog is a web-based and web-appropriate form, and rather than merely presenting print content on the web.
then also it has driven mainstream news organizations to cover certain stories in certain ways. that's a major effect, and i suspect will be much more pronounced as time goes on. one model might be open-source software. if you've got thousands of people working on something, you can get better results. wikipedia is also a good model: it has already far surpassed britannica in content because it has thousands of voluntary contributors.
of course it doesn't work quite that well with blogs maybe, cause you're going to have to wade through worlds of potential crap. but also the blogosphere has directionality, etc, movement toward or away from particular treatments of particular topics.
