American Journalism Review: Blogging on the Hustings. The end of the campaign brought a sense of wistfulness to many Virginia bloggers. Several said they didn’t expect the blogosphere to be quite as open and free the next time around. Candidates, corporations, advocacy groups and paid bloggers – operatives hired by interest groups to blog as if they were ordinary voters – threaten to dominate the landscape next campaign season. Bloggers still cheer whenever one of their online brethren pokes a hole in a story from the MSM. But increasingly, bloggers turned away from the question of who’s a journalist to focus more on whose voices will be heard.
