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I found this article on a blog/media interaction fascinating. The reaction of the newspaper to this incident is a lot like the reaction of CBS to the "Rather-gate" document thing - sheer shock that someone, anyone, would be questioning the high and mighty media. Take this reaction, at the bottom of the article, for instance:

For ombud Parry, both sides should be warned to be careful dealing with the effects of blog-newsprint battles. "I have yet to find anywhere in the mainstream media anyone who really has a handle on bloggers," she asserts. "We are dealing with a relatively new phenomenon."

Over here in the technical realm, we have the technical press, but they seem - for the most part - far, far more savvy to the changed media-scape than the rest of the media. For one thing, there are prominent tech journalists blogging - like Jon Udell and Dan Gillmor. Even the analyst community (no favorite of mine) has a hand in the water - notable is Jupiter Research, which has a bunch of their people out there. Notably absent is the sloppiest of the analyst outfits, Gartner - I guess they are too busy making 20 year predictions to pay attention to anything relevant.

Things have changed. It's not that bloggers are better or more reliable than the media, it's that it's now possible for individual expertise to be applied in ways that it couldn't be before blogs became popular. Reporters tend to be generalists - and generalists often make simple errors in their reporting. What's changed is that those errors can be publicized. A decade ago, no one saw the letter to the editor. Now Google can locate the "what so and so got wrong" story. Time for the major media to take note of that change.