Are Blogs Good News Sources?

Blogs are awesome. They can be like Facebook statuses or tweets taken to the next level. They can be portals into someone's soul. They can be a waterfall of emotions. But they cannot be good sources of news. They can be the in-depth details of a news story, they can be the missing puzzle pieces in a story, but they cannot be the source of news themselves.

Well in the technical sense, they can. If I sat behind this computer and typed out the hypothetical conversation I overheard my roommate having about assassinating the President and it ends up his last name is Bin Laden, then yes my blog was a good source of news. But lets not get crazy now, blogs aren't good sources of news.

Blogs show the video of protesters at Wall Street getting punched by cops, something we already knew was happening. Blogs displayed the pictures of the brutality committed by Northern African police forces and military personnel against the Arab Spring revolutionaries. The blogs of sports writers go in depth into stories they have already broken. Blogs help us fill in the gaps and they add dramatic flair to already broken stories. A good source of novelty information, yes. A good source of secondary details, sure. A good source of straight news? No.