More evidence that blogs and blogging are becoming a mainstream force in publishing with a poll published by We: Media showing that the majority of Americans (55 per cent) say that bloggers are important to the future of US media. Seventy-four per cent said that they believed citizen media will play a vital role.

The difference between blogging and citizen media are not precisely defined in the report, but appear to refer to a distinction between personally published websites (blogs) and individuals' views and responses collated by larger organisations including tradtional media outlets such as newspaper websites and vox-pop sections in television programmes.

The report continues:

Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

The dissatisfaction with traditional media channels found by the research was almost unanimous - 88% said they were unhappy with journalism. Ninety-five per cent of respondents who described themselves as 'very conservative' said that the quality of journalism today is not what it should be. Interestingly, only 51 per cent of those who identified themselves as 'liberals' said they were dissatisfied with the quality of journalism in the US.

The overall view thus appears to be that self-publishing and the opening-up of traditional media to non-traditional sources might be its salvation. Ninety percent of respondents said that the trustworthiness of media will be key to its future. Journalism remains extremely important to most Americans, with 72 per cent saying that it was important to their community.

Andrew Nachison, co-founder of iFOCOS - the 'institute for the connected society' comments: “The research documents the widespread recognition that control and influence on how we know what we know is shifting to a vastly more distributed network of empowered individuals and organizations.

"This obviously will have a big impact on how media organizations evolve and conduct business, but it’s really about how we all discover, create, share and apply information, and that’s important to all industries, to entrepreneurs, to non-profits, to governments, to individuals and to society as a whole. We are all part of the ecosystem.”

The trends highlighted by the report seem likely to continue, with younger audiences being more dependent on and trusting of internet sources than older generations:

The youngest adults in the poll, those age 18-24, were far more likely to say they mostly get news from Internet sites—58% said the Internet is their main destination for news, with television coming in second at 18%. Fewer than one in 10 in this age group said they get the majority of their news from newspapers.

The pollsters interviewed 5384 online respondents between January 30 and February 1 2007.