Dave Taylor takes a contrary tack, supporting the main thrusts (but not the tone) of the Forbes article on blogs. Where I think he goes a bit off the rails is in this segment, where he makes the point that bloggers aren't journalists:

I've wrestled with this point myself, having been on panels about blogging sponsored by the Society for Professional Journalists and similar. It's fashionable to be skeptical of journalists, especially after con men like Jayson Blair sully the reputation of even the most revered bastion of professional journalism, but it is nonetheless true that the vast majority of journalists check their facts and ensure they have at least two sources to corroborate information.

Bloggers, on the other hand, are happy to cite other bloggers as the source of information, a tortuous chain that often ends at a single person opining something controversial and interesting about a company or product. Bloggers also don't respect moratoriums on publishing information from companies, arrogantly believing that the blogosphere is more important than any sort of announcement schedule by the organization. As a result, few companies pre-release information to even the most serious and professional of bloggers.

I don't think I'd make the claim that journalists are any better at sourcing and fact checking than bloggers are. For all the vaunted fact checkers and editors, they still screw up, early and often - because, like bloggers, they have their own axes to grind, and sometimes let their personal opinions/politics run ahead of the facts. There were many cases of this during the last Presidential election, from all sides of the political spectrum. In the IT sector, it happens a whole heck of lot with industry analysts - you needn't look far to find claims of "pay to play" in that realm.

My point? Bloggers are no better or worse than their MSM cousins here. The main difference is that the barrier to entry for blogging is much, much lower. As to embragoing information? Don't make me laugh. More than half of reporting is publishing information that someone didn't want to see made public. You see this in politics and in tech reporting - heck, Apple goes nuts when anyone leaks information on some "secret sauce" they have in mind.

What analysts and reporters fear is that their former monopoly on opinion mongering is at an end. No one likes to share a stage they used to have to themselves.