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?
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:)
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:)