Martin Dugage, a great source of interesting comments, and Seb, another great source, led me to a brilliant article (PDF)on the "new journalism". It's by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis and commissioned by the American Press Institute. It's old - as in last September 2003ish! - but read it if you haven't.

The basic idea is that audiences know more than journalists, so it makes sense for journalists to use them. Where journalists, media groups etc used to provide quality editorial, blogs now help do that to a certain extent. This diagram puts their new role neatly:

Call me a dyed in the wool reactionary if you want, I still think the change is a two-way process. The world of journalism may indeed have to shape up to take into account the dynamism of blogs, but I think it's a rash blogger who thinks there's nothing to learn from a journalism 1.01