> thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users
Wait what? I still find blogs pretty distinct from regular news, in that regular news are mostly bullshit and blogs tend to deliver actual information in a reasonable format.
"Blogs" is a useless category to generalize about: it just describes a medium, and is on an axis entirely separate from content (even the NYT has blogs, for example).
There are blogs I read that put far more effort into attempting to ensure that their analysis is correct than papers like the NYT. They don't have the resources and connections that the NYT does for hard-fact, "did this incident occur" checks, but they're far, far less likely IME to (e.g.) misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent a recently-published academic paper, pretty much regardless of the subject. On top of that, they're a lot more likely to "show their work" and their comment sections are a lot more likely to have credible rebuttals to their main claims (hell, a link to a counterargument I made in a comment was recently edited in to an article on one of the blogs I frequent).
You'd think this would be a problem mainly for factoid-type, pop-science articles about space or wildlife, but the most egregious examples I can think of come from coverage of analyses in the social sciences. This is way more damaging, since people form their opinions on policy through the accumulation of their understanding of articles like these.
I understand that journalists aren't necessarily any smarter than the rest of us when it comes to things out of their field, so there's some baseline level of inaccuracy you'd expect, but some of what you see out of papers like the NYT is just flat dishonesty. And I say that as someone who's a fan!
Wait what? I still find blogs pretty distinct from regular news, in that regular news are mostly bullshit and blogs tend to deliver actual information in a reasonable format.