There does seem to be a “Poor journalism” bias on blogs that parallels your “bad news” bias.

Poor journalism in MSM “sells” blogs. Exposing/Fisking it seems an important structural component, capturing both blogging’s reliance on MSM and its interaction with it.

re: “blogging has reached the cultural limelight” – Blog of the Year

Perhaps something of a quick blog-lit review on structure? Call it the beginnings of a blogiography?

Expression

But people blog so that they can express themselves — to be producers, not consumers — and we see this impulse across the world of new and alternative media.

Filter/Gatekeeping

Being a member of the Fourth Estate is more about process than goals. Journalism is about increasing information flow and transparency. That doesn’t appear to be the process that Sinclair supports. That isn’t really the process that any government-licensed gatekeeper supports.

Visibility

… got more overall attention for his argument by making it in the blogosphere than it would have gotten if he’d printed it in the rather large conventional paper whose opinion pages he runs.

Research/Archive

In the course of a rambling panel discussion I had occasion to ask this crowd of people–maybe 150 working mainly in Big Media’s online news industry–whether they knew that their carefully-researched article on the big polluting oil company was never going to become part of Google search and would therefore be lost to users who overwhelmingly go to the Web for research. Why? I said. “Because your links expire or they hit a pay wall or you asked them to register.” I said you’re nowhere when it comes to Search from a user’s perspective. No matter how good it is, your stuff does not show up.