Can blogging replace the main stream media?

On Club Troppo, Don Arthur has been debating the question as to whether blogs can replace newspapers as a source of reporting. Don thinks not. For your information, the posts in date ordre to this point are:

• The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur
• Feral Skeleton hits back at “sensorious drivel”
• Bloggers or journalists: whose opinion writing is better?
• Breaking news: Mr Denmore and I agree

As with the issues I covered in Facebook's decline?, I have written a lot on this issue over the last few years because the topic interests me.

Let me cut straight to the chase. Blogging cannot replace newspaper reporting. That's not its role.

As a regular blogger, I think of myself as an analyst and commentator. I also reserve the right to follow the purely personal. I do report sometimes, but only when I think that there is a gap that should be filled. When I do report, I try to be factual, not merely opiniated.

I spend a lot of time on some of my stories, often more than a reporter can working to rigid deadlines. As much as possible, I try to give links to original source material. I also generally, perhaps too often, give links back to past posts so that people can check what I said before. Yet I cannot replace the normal working journalist for a purely practical reason.

Within time, I can only do so much. Even if there were hundreds of bloggers like me, and there are not, we simply cannot replicate the daily reporting grind.

What we can do, and this is something I tried to explore a little recently in The political rise of the bloggertariat, is to act as a review mechanism in a way the normal press cannot. The plurality of the bloggosphere helps here.

I think that's a useful role.