If blogging is to replace journalism, it has to do a better job than current journalists. Even journalists are now decrying the low quality of reporting. Of note: “CEOs describe business journalists as lacking a basic understanding of how businesses operate.” Now that’s pretty scary. If you cover something, shouldn’t you at least understand its basics?
The main problem here is the way journalists are trained (and, as a journalism graduate, I went through it): we learn to gather facts and write quickly and efficiently (I know, I know, some people are going to complain about how wordy I’ve been getting lately) but most J-school students do not learn anything else. What should happen is that journalism schools should require that its student also have another major so they would develop field expertise in something else than just gathering facts and writing on deadline.