Weblogs may have started out as personal babbling pages, and many still are, but more and more, weblogs are taking a mainstream news and communications role. This year's political campaigns have adopted weblogs as a way to reach a wider audience. People are getting paid for blogging. What is the future of weblogs as a news and communications media, and how will it affect traditional journalism?

In a way, bloggers are just amateur editorial writers. Those who are good at it may have their blogs syndicated by established media outlets, but that's no different than a good writer getting hired to write editorials using traditional tools. Still, the ease of setting up a blog is resulting in a proliferation of editorialists to choose from. As we gain the ability to limit our listening to voices with whom we already agree, we run the risk of narrowing our view of the world and decreasing our ability to understand, even when we don't agree with, other points of view.

For a solution to this problem, we can look to PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. An unbiased host (Mr. Lehrer has even sacrificed his right to vote because he doesn't want to compromise his ability to be and be accepted as an unbiased host--a higher calling than casting a single vote) brings in people from both sides of issues and conducts and intelligent and civilized discussion. Hopefully more blogs will crop up that are shared between people who disagree peacefully, or where an unbiased host invites guest bloggers to discuss issues in a civilized manner.

Another risk we run with the proliferation of blogging is that we will be too accepting of the opinions and claims of bloggers and will be mislead by dishonest bloggers. Traditional news outlets have standards (which they don't always live up to, but do almost always strive for) for at least verifying facts before using them to support conclusions and opinions. Amateur media tends lack at least some of the access, the budget, the concern, and the ingrained ethics to drive a sufficient level of verification of facts. Solution: choose your sources wisely, and read enough variety to ensure that you're not bamboozled too easily.

Finally, a little brainstorm on what could be done with blogs. Although more and more people are using technologies like RSS and Atom to access blogs directly, there's still plenty of room to build websites that unite a number of blogs into a newspaper-like format. Syndicating quality blogs on a variety of subjects on one website, structured to create a consistent, unified reading experience would be a great way to build a news outlet. I'll have to keep that in mind for someday when I have a little free time.