I don't think it's that bloggers are more free of conflicts of interest, but that there are more bloggers so there is a higher percentage whose conflicts of interest are not relevant to a given story.

It goes beyond "not relevant" to just plain "in line with". The Lewinsky scandal was broken by a right-wing blog in 1998.

Breaking a story that someone else is sitting on is interesting - but it still requires (in the Lewinsky scenario) reporters doing actual investigations. Newsweek had the story. Drudge broke that they were sitting on the story. Drudge also isn't a blogger. He's a news aggregator that very occasionally does original reporting (which usually consists of leaks of book galleys, and stuff about to be published...often leaked to him on purpose by reporters to drum up interest and drive clicks to the story a few hours later, and in many cases political operatives pushing narratives, especially during campaigns)

Felix Salmon also fudges the notion of reporter vs. blogger. He is employed by Reuters, and he blogs for them. How do you draw the distinction between blogger and reporter?

I'm not trying to take away from the important transformation that is occurring, but I think that to put it in a binary divide of bloggers vs. old media/MSM reporters is too broad.

In 1998, there wasn't really the concept of a blog or a blogger. My point is that mass-consumption journalism is falling short of the ethics that it is supposedly built on, but the explicit bias and naked greed of mass-production journalism actually balances out to something more usable, if you're information literate. No one has to pretend to be impartial anymore. But they can and do argue with each other, allowing the audience to watch and make their own judgments.

If you're not information literate, maybe you need a perfectly impartial press with no conflicts of interest. Tough shit--human nature rarely allows us such a luxury. The history of news has more Hearsts, Pulitzers, Murdochs, Drudges, Huffingtons, and Arringtons than any kind of ideal journalists.

I would tend to think they are. Bloggers have to worry about much smaller scale of income/loss than a newspaper as big as new york times. Higher percentage also helps.

Felix is one of my favorite bloggers, but he's not your typical pajama clad amateur. He's paid by Reuters, and his career path looks much closer to a traditional journalist/analyst, who happens to write for the web. He works in an office, and actually picks up the phone to investigate stories. If he is the model for the future, it's one where reporters still rule the roost, once they get over themselves and figure out the internet.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Salmon

Well, Felix Salmon is a Reuters employee. Just because he's a blogger doesn't mean he's independent of big media companies and their conflicts. (I'm not pointing to any wrongdoing or turpitude on Salmon's part, just observing that an inflated claim is being made for his independence.)

If bloggers play a useful role in this kind of situation (and I think they do) it's not because "they are often more free of conflicts of interest" but because they're building a personal brand rather than contributing to an institutional brand, and that gives them a higher risk tolerance: they get more payoff from a big scoop, and they don't answer to editors whose incentives tend toward minimizing embarrassment.