It's important to understand what role blogs play in the media.

First, they are not the wire services. You cannot use blogs as a primary source of news.

However, you can use blogs for some other purposes:

1) Local reporting. Bloggers that blog from Iraq are especially useful and give perspectives no one else does. Bloggers are also great for reporting on local crises at the scene and telling you details that the MSM, for space requirements, did not.

2) News aggregation. Bloggers, especially Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, aggregate lesser known news stories or interesting articles that you probably wouldn't have found on your own.

3) Opinion and analysis. Bloggers are essentially an op-ed page, only better, because they actually link to statistics to back up what they say. How anyone can trust say, a NY Times columnist givng you an unsourced stat and then turn around and say you can't trust bloggers(who link to supporting evidence of the stat in question) is beyond me.

4) Activism. Many little events that in prior years would have remained little events became big deals because bloggers got hold of them and encouraged their readers to write their Congressmen or otherwise raise a stink.