Check out Jay Rosen’s eloquent piece on the power of blogs to empower formerly passive audiences: 

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another– and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.

I really enjoyed this piece.  It reminded me that a few short years ago there weren’t many blogs and that blogs are now truly pushing the media to cover certain stories that would have previously remained beneath the corporate media radar.  It makes me wonder how bad things would have been by now without the blogs.