Hugh Hewitt writing over at the Daily Standard is trumpeting the end of old media due to the bloggers draining off the advertising dollars.

It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information reformation is advancing--or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away, and not slowly. Other new aggregators are in the works, and the revenue flowing into new media will further strengthen and expand its reach.

He is, of course, correct.

I have been on this soap box for over a year and just wrote about it in a post two weeks ago.

Remember, it was just a few short years ago that the Internet bubble burst. The Internet advertising revenue model was all but doomed. Non-Internet ready concerns who were scrambling to catch up, which included many in the mainstream media, breathed a collective sigh of relief. Saved by the bell. However, it quickly became obvious that the technology bust did not dissuade the marketers from the Internet. Just because large brick-and-mortar concerns cum Internet businesses went belly up didn't mean that the almighty consumer quit the web. The consumer was still very active on the Internet. Where there are consumers, there will be advertising.

. . .

Newspapers, like everyone else in the news media, make money from advertising. Advertising dollars follow the consumer. The newspapers have always wrongly assumed that they had high-paying advertisers simply because they were the established newspapers. Because they were the elite. Wrong. They had advertisers because they had an audience of consumers. Period. End of story.

While conventional wisdom always seemed to think the Blogosphere would take over as a counter to media bias, I always thought it would be because the money moved. Seems people are starting to come around to my way of thinking.

Although the Instapundit was way ahead of me. Natch.

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Tapscott also has a nice analysis of what the heck is going on and why