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I think the problem is a bit deeper than that: I think that journalism as a product rather than as advocacy has failed. There are hundreds of amazing free blogs out there, surviving on donations from people who appreciate their existence and/or sacrifices from people who think it's worth it to be heard. It's idea capitalism, and just because you have half a billion dollars to spend doesn't mean that people will want to read you any more than Bill from Baltimore.

A criticism of that point of view is often that good journalism needs the money to send journalists into the field. I think that point of view forgets what journalists are by function - a way to connect people to other people; a technical problem. If we can make sure that anyone who wants to be heard can speak somewhere where everyone who wants to hear them can, we're done. The network effects implied by that will probably shift through a lot of stable configurations in future, but none of them will be effected at all by simple distribution monopolies. Computer networking and mobile are changing everything.

Product journalism is even newer than commercial music, and will also end up in the history books as a relic of the 500 year period on history where the kinks in the mass reproduction and distribution of words, images, and sounds were being worked out. Then we move on to touch:)

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I seriously believe that event-based journalism, for lack of a better term I can't think of (eg. sports, war, elections, etc) need real journalists on the ground in order to capture nuances that would get missed through virtual networks. My issue isn't about the quality or accuracy of the facts, but it's about curation of the facts to grab what matters and put it into an efficient and coherent story. Without the effort of quality journalists on the ground, I'm forced to try to curate all that myself, which is very time consuming, or rely on someone else who is equally removed from the subject to curate it for me, which is pretty much journalism anyway (except they might miss something they wouldn't if they were on the ground). I know few people with that much time. I certainly don't have it. :(

I see curation as the important problem right now. It's telling that the two web juggernauts right now are Google and Facebook - both basically curation companies through search and social networking.

Of course blogs don't have to be first-order (in fact, more of them need to be!) Most blogs (like most traditional media these days) are parasitic off of factual traditional reporting and academic papers, and other blogs go off into third-order meta-analysis.

If you need your narrative, there's somebody out there who wants to give it to you, we just have to figure out a way to make sure they can eat. Tax deductions for donations? Monthly billed funds to make sure that you can donate to sources that support the information you like to consume, but you may not have an awareness of?

I came in here to post "Wikileaks" as a rebuttal to OP, but I see you have it covered.

Oh, you mean like how Wikileaks shut itself down for a few weeks until its donation ransom was met?

I'm thinking more about easy to use low footprint FOSS blogging software, cheaper smaller processors, wireless, mesh networking, internationalization, distribution (a la bittorrent, group blogs, arXiv, Wikis, mirroring/CDNs, even '+1'ing, 'like'ing, 'digg'ing and 'stumbling'), encryption, computer translation, etc.

Wikileaks is a fascinating, unpredictable result of the technological amplification of voices going on at a lower level.

edit: I'd rather see a release of their submission engine (or a better one) and an easy way to distribute and hide content in a way that it can't be suppressed by angry governments than to have the entire idea of leaking tied to a single personality - not that I don't like Assange:)