I think Nick Cohen’s just about got it here:

And yet… buried underneath the dreadful and the derivative was a
rough diamond: My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell. It tells
the reader what it’s like to be a grunt fighting in the Sunni Triangle
with more power and authority than the best embedded reporter in the
world could manage. My War has been a cult hit in America – just before
he died, Kurt Vonnegut sent Buzzell a fan letter – and it would never
have been written if blogging had not been invented.

In theory,
Buzzell could have kept a diary, gone home and turned it into a book.
In practice, he wouldn’t have had the self-confidence. His blog gave
him strength because it attracted praise from hundreds of readers in
the eight weeks before the authorities stopped him posting from a cyber
cafe at the US base in Mosul. Their encouragement made him realise he
could make it as an author.

Buzzell’s small justification for Web
2.0 holds true for others. Anonymity may give free rein to spluttering
buffoons to write without being held to account for their words, but it
also allows police officers and NHS doctors to describe the faults of
the public sector without fear of their bosses firing them. The
medium’s unlimited space allows millions to drone on in blogs that no
one but their friends will read, but the same lack of constraint allows
professors to bring their knowledge to a general audience without
adhering to the stultifying styles of academia.

In journalism as
in publishing, fine writers and commentators have broken through from
the blogs to the mainstream and it is good to see them succeeding. But,
dear God, there are too few of them, far too few: tiny islands of
talent in a roaring, foam-flecked sea.

Yes, blogs are full of the most absurd amounts of crap, as are blooks, teh interweb and just about anything else: don’t forget, 99% of everything is crap. And yet there are those diamonds out there, and the system as a whole does manage to uncover some of them. Just as the previous systems of sorting and filtering found some of them.

Both systems have false positives (think, say, some of the networked young beneficiaries of nepotism in the press) and false negatives (myself, clearly, why aren’t I writing an OpEd piece for at least one newspaper a day?) but the value of the differing systems is that each will throw up different examples of each.

We also get a reminder of why some get the big bucks:

…tiny islands of talent in a roaring, foam-flecked sea.

An excellent phrase to describe the whole thing. If only the Mail, Express, Metro, Star, Mirror and so on could be described the same way…well, the Mail can be, Keith Waterhouse, but you know what I mean.