[...] Three questions emerged from our discussions: Can internet journalism of the kind we had been discussing, really make money? Does it make for better journalism? Can it be more professionally controlled?
As for the blogger-sphere does some of the whistle-blowing that takes place there make government more or less responsible and responsive?
The answer to the first (Can journalism, internet-journalism make money?) was yes. The immaturity of the dot-com revolution in the 1990s had now largely been overcome. Then traffic flow meant nothing. Now hits and responses are registered and counted, and there is advertising generating revenue. Established newspapers, like the Washington Post and the Financial Times, are beginning to generate real revenues by charging for access to part of their Websites. Newspapers including the UK’s Guardian, have nevertheless anticipated a gap between declining print-revenue and what it might in the future generate through online-revenue.
There was growing evidence of the influence of bloggers on the electoral process, particularly in this year’s electoral campaigning in the United States. There was praise in the group for the blogging phenomenon on the grounds that it was raising germane journalistic issues. It was emphasised that  blogging was achieving professional status and that leading journalists, such as Martin Wolf and Tom Friedman had joined the blogging community.
The issue was raised of American dominance and control of the internet and of the leading search engines such as Google. The lack of search engines in Arabic or in languages like Urdu and Chinese was a serious problem. There was a hot debate on this matter in the international world of online-journalism. But this working group was simply not interested. It was raised briefly and just put to one side.

The overall impression from our discussion is that while the internet has been leaping forward, our discussion of the issues stays far behind. [...]