My issue with this is that even with the rise of smaller localized communities of news gatherers you enter a very large problem of filtration. What is the most important news to be read? Furthermore localization means you start to rely on citizen reporting more, which is often biased to begin with creating problems of balkanization.

The current system of reporting actually is links as they mentioned, how much of it is actual original reporting and how much is it simply a form of echo effect from one source? I saw alot of this during the Iraq war, where one news source would be magnified through blogs some ten times.

Eventually turns out the source was wrong, that source was the US government when it claimed Saddam was getting yellow cake, given out as a press release based on the interrogation of one informant code named Curve ball.

I think the idea of decentralizing news reports is a great idea, particularly in terms of disrupting the echo chamber effect. The problem there wasn't just the mass repetition, it was that the mass repetition became unanimous about what was being repeated, and it was all false.

I guess I see blogs as having a different long-term effect. The blogs I think of most as shaping public discourse are ones that take a grassroots approach to reporting, where everyone gets to speak up with what they know or have found, and in Web 2.0 fashion people highlight whether it becomes a top story or not, and if there's incorrect reporting there's a comment section to give more information that either detracts or adds to the original report, or better still post their own contrary report, and let people flag it up.

That's open to distortion, but at least people can decide themselves what news is important, rather than leaving it to professional editors who live in their own bubbles.

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