The Berkman Center's John Palfrey has an interesting post proposing a theory on how digital natives, those who have grown up with the web central to our lives, read the news.  No more daily papers, broadcast TV or big anchors acting as the central source of information, but instead following a path of graze, dive deeper and a feedback loop like blogging.  That sounds like as good an explanation as any to me, though I wonder how many of us skip the dive deeper step?  If that step isn't taken it would seem a major flaw in the quality of the discourse.

 Much attention has been paid to the blogosphere's alleged lack of fact checking as is supposedly key to traditional media - but how many of us take the time to check other online information regarding our topic of interest before blogging?  How do we know when we've dove deep enough?  I know that before I write about a particular URL I at least search for other links to it.  Sometimes I'll do a Sphere search for related blogosphere resources, or look in del.icio.us popular under related tags.  If we don't have a formal structure for fact checking, research and editorial oversight - what do we have?