Ok, but integrating all of that into something quickly and easily digestible, checking it for facts, and checking to see if it's even covering the whole story is still not something part of that ecosystem. There's a startup for someone, but I'm not sure it's something that's going to be tech driven...

That, or there's Instapundit and Daily Kos.

Most popular bloggers lean towards collect stories -- they don't write them.

Blogs are a distributed newsroom: reporters and editors don't even have to know each other to outwrite and outthink the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Those are all politics, all the time. Something like cnn.com has a much better mix of stories, even if they're certainly not stellar journalists. People are motivated to get involved in politics stories for free (everyone has an opinion, and to judge by lots of people, don't even need much in the way of facts to have one), but much less so to go out and do real reporting.