Traditional media is not doing a good job of this. They can stick a reporter out in a hurricane or a war zone or the White House briefing room, but how often does that produce useful data? So often we get nothing but shallow, misleading information, or a dutiful transcription of statements from "both sides".
Professional journalism will survive, but hopefully it won't look the same.
But reporting from war zones and crime scenes and whatnot is something altogether different. If we don't have reporters in those situations, who should we believe? The military? The police? Should we expect bloggers to fill in the gap by jetting off to Syria? Should we expect bloggers to attend state government proceedings day after day, or should we expect our representatives to honestly and completely disclose what they discuss when none of us are present, or to properly notify us ahead of time before anything "interesting" is discussed?
Clearly, I'd rather see professional journalism in those roles. Bloggers and social media have important roles in the news industry as well, but I'm concerned by the thought of a future without professional journalism.
What about the written reports? The field journalists in Gaza, talking to the groups on the ground and giving first-hand accounts of the violence? That's important. Relying on cheap recording devices in the hands of locals is a terrible idea- they are the very people least likely to be impartial. To use the Gaza example, there would be thousands of recordings of Israeli strikes, but very few of missiles being launched the other way because no-one would want to record it. We'd end up with entirely biased coverage.
Who would be writing something like this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/world/middleeast/israel-ga...
?
This sort of snobbery towards blogs one of the big reasons that newspapers are failing so badly these days. The medium is unimportant, the content is what matters. Just because it's printed on newsprint, doesn't make your content good. Just because it's on a blog, doesn't mean the content is bad.
However, a lot of self-produced writing out there seems to lean towards being heavily opinionated, with no attempt at objectivity or journalistic integrity. This is what concerns me- not the presentation method. It just so happens that blogging is the most popular medium for this kind of output.