Blogs turning into mainstream media?

The news that the popular political blog the Huffington Post is going to start doing some of it's own original reporting sort of caught me off guard when I read a story in the New York Times yesterday.

I know blogs are a big deal and that some of them do their own original reporting (they're definitely not afraid to break big stories), but this was different because the Post blog is hiring journalists like any other media organization would to do reporting on the 2008 campaign and Congress this January. Arianna Huffington, who started the blog, said the site hired Melinda Henneberger, a print journalist who worked with Newsweek magazine most recently and was a New York Times reporter before that.

The Post site got a $5 million investment earlier this year and Huffington said that it was always her intention to do original reporting and now she has the funds to do so. “That’s the combination you need online,” she said in the New York Times story adding that her reporters will have deadlines, regular schedules and travel for stories, which is very atypical in the blogosphere. Her reporters will also be paid, also an anomaly for the blogosphere.

So, for all this talk about the blogosphere being "new media" and it's own form of journalism, I think news like this shows that bloggers are going to continue to more more toward the mainstream media.