Seeking Alpha has a post by Peter Cooper which addresses whether the recent traffic surge seen by finance blogs is sustainable.  Noting that traffic on his own blog has increased tenfold since the summer, Cooper comments on the limitations of blog content reliability and then wonders if mainstream financial publications should make some sort of commitment to hosting blogs of their own.

The reason he gives for the traffic increase is credible:
The response time of conventional news services, and even the financial newswires like Bloomberg is simply too slow in highly volatile markets. A humble blogger close to the information and a PC can deliver a faster service.
I think that this hunger for more indepth and up-to-date information has been out there for a while.  In 2007, I found myself hitting the sites on the financial blogosphere, Seeking Alpha included, for a couple of reasons. 
  • My employer at the time was trying to secure deals with corporations which were in a state of shareholder turmoil.  This helped my coworker and I get some perspective on whether the deals were likely to go through.  We wound up doing a better job of predicting where the deals would go than our upper management.
  • My job search included several publicly traded companies.  Some of them were in the financial services sector, with exposure to the subprime meltdown.  This helped me understand why some potential employers were being loopy in their hiring process, and it even saved me from accepting an offer from a company that was turning toxic.
In each case, blog posts gave me the information necessary to construct a narrative about the raw numbers, like stock prices and earnings, from which I could make an informed decision.

If journalism is the first draft of history, then blogging is closer to the scrawlings of the reporter's notebook.  In some cases it's raw and tentative, but when balanced against multiple sources, the noise usually gets filtered out, and you're left with a mental model that has greater depth than the short blurbs delivered by the wire services.  In times of uncertainty, that kind of understanding is truly valuable.  That's a lesson that mainstream journalism needs to understand as it tries to adapt to a changing market for information.