David Rubinstein of SDTimes says that we should trust the professionals in media rather than bloggers. Let me start with his summary:

As more unnamed, untrustworthy writers enter the blogosphere, they will actually drive readers back to the traditional publishing sites, where the George Wills and Maureen Dowds -- and in our industry the Alan Zeichicks, Peter Coffees and Larry O’Briens -- have proven, over years of reporting and analysis, that they are the names you can trust.

Unnamed? If there's a rise in anonymous blogging, it's not in the areas I follow. But hey - no mention of the AP, Reuters, and UPI, who also push out stories with no bylines quite frequently (and whose stories get spread a lot more widely). And Maureen Dowd, or George Will? Those two are opinion columnists, not reporters. You don't read either one to get breaking news, and I'm not sure why either of their opinions on politics would be better than a blogger's.

Further back in his article, he mentioned WikiPedia:

Meanwhile, encyclopedia publishers employ a veritable army of fact-checkers to ensure the information they put out is accurate. Does Wikipedia use the same standard, or does it assume that the public at large is the army of fact-checkers, who jump in and correct errors they find? Well, what happens if the day I look something up is the day before someone with better knowledge corrects the very entry I relied on the day before? Who’s standing at the gate before this information gets disseminated over the Internet?

I addressed that here. Short answer: Wikipedia has churn primarily in controversial (current or near current) events. The fact checkers used by Wikipedia are reviewed in real time regularly - when are the fact checkers for a print encyclopedia reviewed? They make errors (and have bias) at the same rate, at least according to the checks that have been done. Rubinstein seems to believe in some mythic infallibility on the part of media pros. Umm, yeah. I have a few names for him - Steven Glass, Jayson Blair, Mary Mapes. Do they discredit the entire media field? Of course not.

By the same token, a few verbal bomb throwers don't discredit the entire blogosphere either. This article sounds a lot like others I've read on this subject - a deperate attempt to prove that the author is part of some group of near infallible experts, while the hoi polloi out here are just noisemakers who should sit down and shut up.