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Much has been written by some very influential writers of this generation about how blogging has changed journalism – See Friedman’s The World is Flat.  Web 2.0 has created new media outlets that have been aiming to use input from individuals online in order to dictate the headlines. This strategy somewhat goes against the old paradigm of the large media conglomerate feeding the news to the people, telling them what is important, rather than letting them decide what they are interested in as a collective group.

This is the basic idea behind sites like Digg, Reddit and Techmeme, where individual input makes a difference as to the content of the sites. Blogging and input based news sites have changed the news industry significantly, creating an open source market within a giant industry. Of course, we have all watched the development of open source software make a huge impact in the software space, which begs the question of whether separated, collaborating individuals can compete with large corporations in other industries.

A lot of what I like about the ideas that sites like those mentioned above bring to the table is that they search for sources outside of the major media outlets like major newspapers and network television, and digs (pardon the pun) into independent news channels and even to reputable blog sites. Of course, with blogs, the issue of linking to them for accurate information is just that: the information isn’t always credible. But that doesn’t have to be the case: who says that the mass media in America always reports credible news?

So then what blogging actually has done is ask the question: what is news?  It’s one thing for the NY Times or Washington Post to send reporters out onto the front lines in Iraq to report on what has been happening there – obviously this is a better perspective than having some blogger in Houston speculating and criticizing the moves on General Petraeus.  What we may see with the combined evolution of blogging and mobile technology is a soldier who actually fought in the streets that day get online and document some of his experiences – taking the middle man out of the equation.

I think we’ve started to see this more and more in recent years, with company and industry leaders being encouraged to write blogs as almost a sort of marketing tactic.  Marc Andreesen comes to mind as an entrepreneur who writes a great blog (currently not writing however).  I know that I for one would much rather read a piece written by Andreesen that some technology reporter for a major newspaper.  Of course what the major media outlets are trying to do is simply hire or contract these ‘experts’ to report in their newspapers or on their TV stations, but the value is certainly there for user driven content within news outlets.  With the botched Google acquisition of Digg recently, we’ll see if someone else will come in and make a deal – a FOX or Viacom perhaps.  Our eyeballs will certainly be watching.