The Beltway-Blog Battle

The loss of Tim Russert comes just as journalists are feeling besieged. Their bosses are slashing staffs, their advertisers are drifting away, and their prerogatives are being challenged by bloggers and YouTubers: a diffuse army of the uncredentialed, uninhibited and--most terrifyingly--unpaid. In Russert, the press lost its most authoritative mass-market journalist, just as it is losing its authority and its mass market. It's too simple to say that the new media are killing off the old media. Interest in political news is sky-high, and new and old media each need the other to supply material and drive attention. What's happening instead is a kind of melding of roles. Old and new media are still symbiotic, but it's getting hard to tell who's the rhino and who's the tickbird.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1816489,00.html