Ok, for the sake of discussion, say newspapers are dead and gone in 5 years. What happens to places like gawker? Will they go out and do their own investigating? Certain blogs have some "real" sources, but they seem to rely more on traditional media for the base story.
As far as I know, the whole nature of blogs like them are to take an existing story and put their own spin on it. I enjoy various blogs (even some in the gawker stable), but if and when newspaper die off, what will they do for content?
There are two levels 'blogger', one that creates content and does a pretty good job of it at that, another that does copy-paste with minor rewrites.
If their original source (the newspapers) dries up my guess is they will start to feed of the other bloggers. This is already happening to some extent.
blogs like engadget or niche blogs written by experts already do original reporting (going to conferences, taking pictures, etc.) They'll be more of them when the Post or the NYT won't be there.
Ah, gadgetry and latest Agile scoop is fine and fun, but would your average blogger do reporting when next Chechnya flares up, or do time-consuming and hazardous research on mafia connections in his southern-Italian hometown?
Reporting of this kind takes time, equipment, connections, travel, bribes - which all translates to money that have to appear somehow.
Yeah, this is what I'm talking about. Blogs work very well for things that you can glean from Press Releases, conferences, and others, hence Engadget and Gizmodo work well.
But local news or even sports requires a lot of elbow grease and footwork. One of my favorite sports blogs is Deadspin. But the only time I can remember them digging for a story is when they were almost able to break the Manny Ramirez steroid story, but their evidence ended up pointed to an average guy who happened to be named Manny Ramirez (not the baseball player). http://deadspin.com/5244230/the-case-of-manny-not-being-mann...
They've been making small inroads into this kind of journalism, but it is far and away the minority.
Well that's what blog means, "web log", i.e. a journal of things its owner has found on the web and finds interesting. No interesting articles on the web -> no blogs.
As far as I know, the whole nature of blogs like them are to take an existing story and put their own spin on it. I enjoy various blogs (even some in the gawker stable), but if and when newspaper die off, what will they do for content?