Laurie Penny:
Bloggers aren’t out to take away the jobs of highly-paid columnists: we’re more ambitious than that. We’re out for a complete revolution in the way media and politics are done. While the media establishment guards its borders with paranoid rigour, snobbishly distinguishing between “bloggers” and “journalists”, people from the internet have already infiltrated the mainstream.
[…]
One thing, however, is certain: journalism is changing forever. The notion of political commentary as a few-to-many exercise, produced by highly-paid elites and policed by big business, has been shattered beyond repair.
The internet is a many-to-many medium, and those who write and comment here are not media insiders, nor are we the mob. We are something altogether new. We are the fifth estate, and we are forging a path through the miasma of technological change towards more a honest, democratic model of commentary – alongside a lot of porn and some pictures of amusing cats.