Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/culture_clash_journalism_and_the_communal_ethos_of_the_blogosphere.html

Carroll, Brian
Into the Blogosphere
2004

Abstract:

In taking the costs of publishing to their near vanishing point, blogging represents one of the most democratic media or media formats in history. As such, traditional print journalism’s natural response has been to embrace the form, encourage it, proliferate it, and to use blogs to fulfill journalism’s mission of informing an electorate and, therefore, bettering democracy. Not quite.