Chicago Tribune just relaunched its website with, of course, more blogs -- A LOT more blogs -- news, entertainment, sports, living, business travel, with multiple blogs in each category.
The killer-app of newspapers is good journalism and reporting from the scene of something interesting. Newspapers fail to do either well today, and wonder why they suffer so much. <p>Bloggers can help -- but not for foreign reporting (aside from foreign bloggers). That is where the money behind news rooms actually would have a huge effect.
It seems like the most natural model would be pro-am collaboration. For example, investigative journalists publish research and then let amateurs incorporate this into their own publications. This is basically what is happening already, so with only a few tweaks it would be possible to both greatly increase the quality and also monetize the whole process.<p>This complicated three-tiered model seems about as workable as the Ptolemaic universe. Much better I think just to give readers the tools to go in the direction they are already taking on their own.