I'm not big on inspirational dailies (last one was Far Side), but as of last week I now get Seth Godin's blogcast. I quote him from today, in reference to his prediction of changes in society due to the internet: 

What an opportunity (for someone) to start taking advantage of the huge pool of talent and passion that is moving online, and to work to raise the bar. We don't need more gossip sites from celebrity magazine editors. We need to identify and reward voices that push hard against the status quo, that report eagerly and accurately and that speak truth to power.

Here's what we're going to miss, and quite soon: the cost of having a printing press and the money to run one meant that there were newspapers with gravitas. Newspapers that invested for the long haul, that stood for something, that spoke up. When you can launch a blog for nothing and disappear quite easily if it doesn't work, the gravitas is a lot more difficult to find. When the newspapers are gone (and it's happening a lot faster than the people in the industry are able to admit) that's what we're going to miss the most.

The opportunity, then, is to organize and network and identify and reward that activity when it happens online. Not because the site is owned by a paper or because the founder has connections to the old media. No, because they're doing work that matters.

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