You have excellent points on the issues of bloggers and on trust factor. In response I would say:

1) WordPress is just the platform technology I am highlighting – thus the contributor does not need to be your average “blogger,” but can be any respected author or contributor.

2) In terms of trust I think that there are plenty of questions surrounding whether the public trusts news coming from traditional news companies. Do folks at newspaper companies or even CNBC or ABC or Fox have any biases? I think we know the answer to that question, so in my opinion I think trust could easily be built into a system like this. But again my main point is that technology of wordpress could easily be deployed in a way and business model that could easily rival printed newspapers, thus helping the overall demise of the newspaper industry.

(the labor, printing and distribution model alone is so costly for the newspaper industry vs. the digital distribution and syndication power of wordpress which can be done so cheaply)

Do one-off bloggers have the credibility to be trusted? Is there any accountability? That’s what newspaper are built around is that credibility and trust to report on the truth.

Sure, anyone can write a blog, but who’s to say they’re trust worthy?

Additionally, it’s a scalability issue of how much is being reported on. A single blogger can only report on so much news, it’s just the matter of human bandwidth. Newspapers have dozens upon dozens of reporters, while sure, blog networks *could* have that, but it’s not scalable.