CNN and Fortune's loss is the blogosphere's gain. Recent news that CNN let go of Miles O'Brien and Peter Dykstra and did away with its environmental/science core production unit, as well as Sam Whitmore's report that Fortune laid off two cleantech mainstays (and accomplished bloggers) – Todd Woody and Marc Gunther – is just another sign of the times: Mainstream Journalism 0, New Journalism 42. If true, I'm bummed for my friends who lost their jobs, but I'm also very excited for them (as a former foreign correspondent and blogger myself) because these are exciting times. We are on the cusp of the creation of a new media world that is the intersection of industry expertise, technology know-how and changing news consumption habits. Declining audience for traditional media is inversely proportional to increasing audience for new media like blogs, video and aggregator sites. Whoever you believe, the numbers are there to back it up – eMarketer says 94.1 million blog readers in 2007, comScore says total Internet audience of 188.9 million or Universal McCann, which says 346 million worldwide read blogs (60.3 million in the US). No doubt blog-savvy folks like Andrew Revkin (NYT DotEarth) and Jeff Ball and Keith Johnson (Economic Capital at WSJ) will continue to thrive (well, almost no doubt). Its clear that mainstream media is trying to shift to meet the challenge. John Byrne of Businessweek wrote on Twitter this week that Businessweek.com had 722,567 video streams in November, up 370% from the same month in 2007. That's good news. But even if they aren't successful, others that are more nimble and able to get their minds around the dynamics of social media (think Greener World Media, Greentech Media and Earth2Tech) should be able to fill the void being created by the retrenchment at traditional media. And at the end of the day, Gunther and Woody still have their own brands that they created through their own blogs, and their survival is not dependent on a bloated mother ship.