What will be the “beer” me make?

On her blog: Blogging into the future, Amanda Clark brings back the fear that is forcing journalists re-think and re-invent their craft for the last years. “Will blogs take over the world of reporting and cause readers to turn to them instead of their local newspapers?”
In the mid-nineties, a great professor from University of Navarra, Jose Luis Orihuela, formulated an interesting analogy that still resounds with me. He presented the case of the medieval monks that faced with the revolutionary invention of print, found themselves without their traditional occupation, of handwriting books. Instead of competing with the invention, they prefer re-invent their role becoming brewers.
The question therefore is: what will be our “beer”? What are we going to do different? I do agree that a way to “combat the issue is for newspapers to simply start reporting better.” Yet, I am afraid it will be more complicated than that. I am not sure that as Amanda suggests, “the popularity of blogs will slowly diminish and newspapers will again come out on top.” The journalistic product has to defeat the alternative. It should be appealing enough to remain superior to its blogosphere counterpart.
During the last week’s local elections, I was able to obtain more helpful local information from blogs than from the conventional media. In the other hand, when it comes to global issues, my experience is that blogs mostly repeat information originated by the conventional media.
I have to still discover what will be the twist we may provide to local papers, to produce our “beer,” but I can think in one fundamental difference:  journalist  get paid.