I found this interesting article at the Tyee that reflects my own experience. Long before I started blogging I was obtaining my news sources through the blogs I was reading everyday. I found blogger communities with similar ideas, perspectives, values and beliefs and then trusted their judgment on the choice of content they linked.

I certainly wasn’t getting this kind of service from the media anymore. In the end this long time daily newspaper reader (I delivered BC’s the Province when I was a young kid and read it everyday) decided it wasn’t worth the trees and gave it up. Sure I have to search for what I read now but places like Google News Search, Progressive Bloggers, Liblogs, Green blogs, Raw Story, the Tyee, etc they just make my life easier. Now I still read news but first I read the blog’s choices and then I read the news. If there is not enough time for both, the blog’s choices usually win my precious time.

Woman at Mile O
I don’t think it is just young people interested in the conversations. While I don’t see  online time as an either/or proposition, I think I tend to spend more time on blogs than I do in traditional media unless I’m researching something quite specific. It’s about more than community, blogs are us; messy, noisy, searching, informed, opinionated, certain, uncertain, quick, open.