Newspaper circulation has been on a steady decline for the last twenty years. For those of us, like me and Thomas Jefferson, who believe that an informed public is essential to democracy, that's a troubling trend. TV news tends to focus more on sensational stories and less on in-depth or investigative reporting, meaning some viewers (especially Fox viewers (non-pdf link to a story referencing the study here)) get a distorted view of the world. Blogs are great for commentary--and, without sounding too optimistic, lower barriers to entry and better competition means cream rises to the top--but what about the news stories on which commentary depends?
There are a couple of new models of news reporting. The first is something like Indymedia, which is decidedly left-wing and open to anyone to contribute. I find the site hard to navigate and wish the stories were better edited (or sorted) so that I could spend time reading better articles first. (Note that Google News doesn't really fit the bill of what I'm talking about, since it's just a digest of already-reported stories.) After Hurricane Katrina, there were early pictures of the damage on flickr--great for eyewitness reporting, and then the blogs (or other analysts) could point out what went wrong. Josh Marshall is raising money for an investigative journalist staff position at Talking Points Memo, turning a blog into a news source (the Institute for Southern Studies is doing something similar with its Investigative Fund.) Finally, there's Political Cortex, which has user-generated stories a la Indymedia but ranks the stories and filters them using Scoop (pioneered by Kuro5hin and taken to the next level by Daily Kos).
One under-utilized resource that has not yet been tapped is the research done by lawyers in discovery. Lawyers are able to find out a lot of facts about private, corporate, and governmental activity through the use of legal discovery, much of which can be disclosed to the public (at least after it's referenced in a court opinion, if not sooner). Legal discovery also allows parties to compel production of documents, something that journalists aren't able to do. Given how crucial the development of facts are for any case, lawyers have great incentives to find things out (and a financial incentive in proving their point). An enterprising person could take the discovery findings of parties and repackage them as investigative journalism pieces--that way, lawyers would get their case heard in the court of public opinion, and the public would have more information on bad actors (and, after all, part of the role of the tort system is deterrence, which can only work if the information is disseminated). I'm looking for the next Steven Brill to take this model ("court reporting?") to the next level and get the facts out there, supplementing the diminishing investigative budgets of newspapers, giving grist to the commentary and analysis on blogs, and making us all better-informed as a result.