In today's Slashdot there's an interesting forum on the topic of how corporate tech media (such as Network Computing) are being replaced by blogs and how bad this is or whether it's bad at all, or just simply inevitable.

What I see is that a log of folks out there try to aggregate others' efforts by creating "communities". Some are very successful and useful, such as http://www.codeproject.com/. Others, as near as I can tell, add nothing to the original information, such as http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/default.aspx or http://www.thescripts.com/ and exist mostly by consolidating information scraped from other sources.

What you get (got?) with professional tech media is (at least in some cases) professional research and professional writing. There is some level of accountability and some level of fact checking. There's a consistency of quality that comes from paying someone to do research and to write about it that often is missing when the person is a blog poster volunteering in his or her spare time.

I think there's a demand for the level of professionalism delivered by tech media, and the printed magazines may go away (save the trees!) but demand for the services provided by the legions of editors, writers and researchers employed by those magazines will not. Instead, you'll see an increasing trend toward pay-per-view tech sites such as sswug.org or http://www.devx.com/.