The information consumers are more interested in useful information than information that is accurate to the nth degree. (Do most people really care whether the new Gateway desktop has a 140 or a 160 gigabyte drive? Editors do but their reader don't see the distinction as important, unless they are about to buy 200 of them.) People are voting with their clicks for useful over accurate.

At the same time if you supply bad information on a subject that they do care about, the blogosphere will quickly point that out and reputation declines as will your number of clicks and hence your potential ad revenues. For solo/small groups of writers maintaining your reputation is vital, since unlike the Washington Post their is no institutional reputation to fall back on. As a result successful online writers are likely to be even more successful, because one major screw-up can cost them their revenue stream.

As advertisers shift budgets online bloggers/writers/reporters will be better compensated and can afford to spend more time developing and researching stories. One big hit is more valuable than a lot of little stories, but in a 24 hour news cycle lots of little hits are the cash cows for news aggregating blogs. People will read these blogs as long as they save them time and give them useful information. As long as enough people read them, advertisers will find them.

We will also see the rise of the investigative mob as people take the wiki approach with dozens of people contributing information to the story. Interestingly, these mob investigation stories will only become big, at least in the digits decade, when mainstream media pick them up.

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