Now the little guy is the true pit bull of journalism

There's an article in the Comment section of today's Guardian by Arianna Huffington about the power of blog, specifically relating to the formation of the news and the threat that the blog space (and the web more generally I guess) poses to old fashioned media. Here's the story.

I'm interested for a couple of reasons:

• Firstly, I do think that blogging has real power to shape the news in a way that is completely different to the mainstream media. People will make 'news' out of the issues they really care about by writing about them, and finding other people with common interests. This should force the fourth estate to represeent the concerns of the public more accurately - otherwise peple will turn to the blog-space instead.
• I disagree about the immediacy of blogs being an advantage over traditional media. Yes, we can read stuff online that's more up to date than that in the printed media. But what newspaper these days isn't also online and constantly up to date. And even offering readers the chance to add their opinions about stories. Some newspaper sites even have blogs these days to adopt some of the same ways of sharing the creative process.

So blogs offer real people an equal footing in terms of creating media in a way that should keep the mainstream media (and others) honest, but I'm not sure I see that there are any real technological advantages that the traditional media owners can't exploit to improve what they offer to readers.

Go on ... disagree with me.