This is the future of...

...journalism, and it ain't all bad:

Dan Kennedy, who follows new-media journalism, says Connecticut is a particularly vibrant example of how entrepreneurial online journalists are filling a lot of the holes left by the decline of newspapers.

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A longtime Connecticut journalist, Paul Bass, has become one of the most watched exemplars of scrappy, low-budget, high-impact local journalism — based on reporting, not attitude and opinion — through his New Haven Independent and Valley Independent Sentinel in the Naugatuck Valley.

“If your beat is the funeral parlor, you just think people are dying,” he said. “If you step outside, you see just as many people are being born. We’re returning to an era when we get news from more than one source again, human beings, rather than one monopoly newspaper sending out as few people as possible so it can make as much money as possible. It’s a new golden age.”

And bloggers will be at the forefront of it all.