The blog community is small, the number of readers not significant in terms of the overall net population, but it has an importance that goes far beyond the numbers – and any system with power needs people *outside* that system who will criticise it, require that those with power account for their actions and generally act as a check on its power.
J[ . . . ]
It isn’t about not liking blogs, it’s about not liking unaccountable concentrations of power, and believing that it is still true that ‘the first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of events of the time and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation’ [said by Robert Lowe of The Times in 1852].