Tim Bray makes a lot of good points in the linked article, but this one really stuck out to me - the fear some people have about blogging is that somehow, someday, an employee is going to make you look bad:

Will You Look Bad? Now let’s address the question from the Big Pharma person: Suppose your employees make you look bad? The answer is obvious: if your employees either don’t understand what your company is trying to accomplish, or can’t do a good job of explaining it, then blogs are the least of your problems. That’s not new. What’s new is that when the information chain’s gatekeepers were the PR people and journalists and analysts, it was a lot easier to run a company from the top down, using traditional Pointy-Haired-Boss techniques.

This is nothing new: The world has a lot of PHBs, and probably always will, and a lot of places will always be badly managed. What’s new is that, in the era of the New Public Relations, well-managed companies—defined as ones where the employees understand the strategy and can communicate it—have one more advantage. This might, in the big picture, make the this whole free-market economy thing work a little better.

That's exactly correct - if your employees make you look bad, you have one of two problems:

• Either you have a staffer you don't need (which pre-dates the internet era)
• You have a bigger problem, as Tim implies above

This doesn't mean the end of PR - I've been pretty down on podcasters, since I think it takes more than a mike and unfocused rambling to make a compelling bit of audio. However, the field of potential audio producers got bigger, just as blogging made the field of potential PR people bigger. With the barriers lowered, quality will out.