There is also the contrary trend of consolidaton, as smaller local newspapers are dying. I'm not sure what the net trend is.

But more importantly, I simply don't observe any lessening of the mainstream media's control over the limits of respectable public discourse and the set of people and issues that will be in the public spotlight (whether positive or negative). The facts about which the original article complains are as true today as they were four years ago.

Similarly, I don't observe any weakening of the intellectual monopoly of the academia, although its output is now widely scrutinized, and interesting contrarian voices heard, on countless blogs and websites. (And it's not like no naked emperors are being revealed in the process.)

On the whole, it seems to me that a vast chasm of status separates contrarian blogs from mainstream online intellectual outlets just as effectively as it separated xeroxed pamphlets from the latter's paper incarnations in the past. High-status and influential people (as well as all those who imagine themselves as such, or hope to become one day) still get their information from the latter, whether in paper or online form, and instinctively shun the former.