Honestly I can’t add any additional value to this post by Peter Himler at The Flack. This bit, from the excellent WaPo article by Howard Kurtz, really hit home:

"Google News offers access within two clicks to 14,000 stories, but really they are accounts of just 24 news events."

It’s a small world, after all. Bloggers did not make the universe of stories any bigger; they made the need to track & react to stories bigger.