Here is a bit of data to support my assertion below that blogging, as influential as it appears to be in generating scandal, is a marginal phenomenon in terms of the people who get their news from it--whether online or off.
Barron's Online - Fighting the Tape

from my furl archive (not sure if this will work)

In February Fox drew an average of 1.57 million viewers a day, more than double CNN's 637,000. Fox has been widening its lead over CNN since 2002, when it first leaped ahead.
But last month, about ten million Americans each still tuned in every evening to those dying dinosaurs, NBC's Nightly News and ABC's World News Tonight. And nearly eight million watched the CBS Evening News.

That show didn't lose too many viewers even after its anchor, Dan Rather, was caught up in the scandal over 60 Minutes' questionable preelection report about President Bush's National Guard service during the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, for those who can't get enough coverage of the Michael Jackson and Scott Peterson cases, NBC's Today show gets about six million viewers a day and ABC's Good Morning America about five million. Three million people a day still watch CBS's perennial also-ran, The Early Show, over their morning coffee.

If you add the ratings of the leading broadcast news shows together--even assuming some duplication among viewers--it's clear that many, many more Americans watch the mainstream network news shows than view either Fox News or CNN.

True, viewership of the network news has been declining for years, and their audience may not be the most "desirable demographic," as the marketing people say.

But even in the cool, dynamic world of the Internet, the mainstream media rule.
The following table from Nielsen//NetRatings shows the 20 most popular news web sites among U.S. users in January.

Top 20 U.S. News Sites -- January 2005
Brand/Channel
Unique Users
Yahoo! News
23,220,000
CNN
22,047,000
MSNBC
20,425,000
AOL News
15,488,000
Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division
12,353,000
Internet Broadcasting Systems Inc.
12,159,000
NYTimes.com
9,774,000
USATODAY.com
9,524,000
Knight Ridder Digital
9,429,000
Tribune Newspapers
9,093,000
Google News
7,811,000
ABCNEWS Digital
7,585,000
Hearst Newspapers Digital
6,720,000
CBS News
6,292,000
WorldNow
6,220,000
washingtonpost.com
5,864,000
Associated Press
5,738,000
BBC News
5,660,000
Fox News
4,848,000
Advance Internet
4,787,000
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Poor, benighted CNN is a juggernaut here; its site pulls in a whopping 22 million users a month. MSNBC.com, whose namesake cable news network long has been a distant third, drew 20.4 million.

Yahoo, which had 23 million users in January, and America Online, with 15.5 million, aren't news organizations themselves but rely on feeds from established providers like Reuters and the Associated Press.

Other big mainstream media outlets whose websites rack up big numbers are The New York Times, USA Today, Knight-Ridder, Tribune and ABC News.

"It is the large branded providers that people are going to [online]," says Charles Buchwalter, Nielsen//NetRatings' vice president of client analytics.

Conclusion: Tens of millions of U.S. Internet users trust the news they're getting from the mainstream media, and this silent majority simply doesn't buy the "liberal bias" argument conservatives have been pushing for decades.

Some might call these millions deluded or brainwashed, but if you believe in free markets, you believe consumers are smart enough to know the difference between a good product and a bad one.

By the way, Fox News's website ranks 19th out of the top 20, trailing even the BBC among U.S. Internet users. Ironically Fox uses the mainstream AP for the news feeds on its own site.
And while we're on the subject of Fox, you might have seen the recent front-page story in The Wall Street Journal about the apparent falling out between Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation's chairman and chief executive, and Liberty Media's chairman John Malone (see "Stock Gambit Strains Relations Between Two Media Titans," March 3).

In that story, the blunt-speaking Malone gave the game away:

"Mr. Malone suggested Mr. Murdoch start the FX entertainment channel, which later became part of a joint venture between News Corp. and Liberty, and in the mid-1990s encouraged Mr. Murdoch to launch the Fox News Channel.

"The mainstream media, Mr. Malone says, 'had drifted off into too much political correctness, too much socialism and we needed a spokesman...for the free market.'"

"A News Corp. spokesman disputes Mr. Malone's characterization of Fox News and says Mr. Murdoch 'always envisioned it as a middle-of-the-road' channel.'"

And I have a middle-of-the-river bridge to sell anyone who buys that.

Fox News has real appeal to certain people. The point of view it and many Internet blogs propound probably has been underrepresented in the opinion sections of many established newspapers, magazines and broadcast networks.

But when it comes to the news, there's no substitute for the mainstream media. Despite our problems, we do our best to report as honestly and professionally as we can.
The American people clearly agree. Numbers don't lie.

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I will also note that, this is something I have been saying for at least two years. No one will ever read this paper as it is long winded and probably mostly banal, but there is a shorter version I tried to edit for a GMU online magazine, but which they ultimately rejected because they wanted it to be written down to undergrads for funding purposes.