My debate with Jack Shafer made me realize something: the next casualty of blogs may be general-interest intermediary publications like Slate. Just a few years ago, the need for a meta- approach to the news seemed compelling. But with so many expert blogs now available for free, I don't need a general interest intermediary anymore. Via RSS, I can easily read political analysis from Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum, economic analysis from Brad DeLong and Marginal Revolution, etc. And given that you have to consume information before determining its value (a key economic feature of the media, as Jay Hamilton points out in his excellent book on the subject), I can have more confidence that posts from trusted bloggers are worth reading than I can with articles on Slate, which are written by a large array of staff and freelancers. (There are obviously bloggers and columnists whose work I knowe well on Slate to whom this doesn't apply, but on a day-to-day basis, most articles are not by those authors.)
The upshot may be that the aggregation/meta-commentary model is not that compelling, at least for heavy media consumers like myself, who (a) get a major national newspaper that does original reporting and (b) read multiple bloggers via RSS, so they don't need a general-interest intermediary. In the near term, of course, Slate is fine; MSNBC.com dumps it huge numbers of visitors each day. But in the long run, RSS may undermine general interest online publications faster than people realize.
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