Donald Luskin describes why weblogs may eventually take over the media, and why they still have a long way to go toward that goal.

I'm not so sure. Journalism has little, if anything, to do with the particular medium used to deliver the story. Journalism is a melange of skills, practices and processes that can be applied independent of the medium used to publish. All of the advantages that technology brings to blogs are also available to anyone who chooses to use the medium.

On some specifics of Luskin's:

1. Trust: Trust is acquired by repeated personal experience and by reputation (people you trust also trust a particular reporter or media outlet). This applies to blogs, which are, after all, just another kind of media outlet. If a blog I trust carries a fabricated report, I'm just as likely to believe it as if the report was published in an established broadsheet. A reputation for trust can be merited or unmerited, damaged and repaired -- but it has nothing to do with the publication medium.

2. Diversification: Access to "many competing sources" of information is available to anyone with net access. More to the point, bloggers access and link to information sources created by someone else (reporters, often) and that are also available via the net. Bloggers do not appear to be leaving their keyboards to conduct research or chase down a story.

3. Source citation: Again, linking to a source is a technical tool available to anyone using the web as a publication medium. Since bloggers typically limit their sources to those already on the web, it is apparent that almost every blog post will contain a link. It is less apparent that bloggers are actively pursuing off-web sources that cannot be linked to. The pressure to add links can act to limit the range of sources used by blogs to reporting by others that is already on the net.

4. Blogs as digests: True, but not a unique aspect of blogs.

5. The Self-Policing Blogosphere: The multitiude of blogs conveys a semblance of unbridled competition, while many individual traditional media outlets lack real competition within their local markets. Many (most?) of the blogging errors and biases caught post-publication by other bloggers could (would?) have been caught pre-publication by an editor at a traditional outlet. The blogosphere needs to be "self-policing" because very, very, very little blogging content must pass muster with an editor before publication. (And, remember, there's no assurance that a report in Blog B about mistakes in Blog A will ever been read by Blog A's afficianados.)

6. Direct participation in news creation: Yes, anyone with net access can start a blog, but the ability to post words and pictures on the net doesn't mean you are "creating" news. It just means you are creating words and pictures. Besides, "news" is something that has already happened, not something you "create". (Luskin lumps in "opinion", which doesn't seem to me to equate to news. Ceaseless ranting in the blogosphere -- or in any other medium -- is not the reporting of news.

I'm inclined to agree, albeit @ less length. Blogs are an amazing resource when it comes to propagating interest & pointing out errors, but private bloggers (or even communities of bloggers) simply do not have the initiative, know-how & sheer amount of resources of actual news outlets.

Not individually, but in aggregate? There are bloggers who are going out to investigate, getting off their keyboards and gathering information. The advantage of the blogosphere is that if one blogger does it, the information spreads rapidly. As more people have weblogs, the odds of that none of them are willing to spend personal time looking in to something approaches nil. I don't think that we'll see many bloggers become general newsources but for any given story there will be bloggers who are real sources with real information.