Hugh Hewitt, in a Weekly Standard article, makes a case for official nurturing of blogging within news organizations. Frankly, it's not all that compelling. Using blogs as a farm system exhibits too much effort for widely varying results. Besides, the help can always go free agent or freelance with little or no effort.
Here's the NMH argument for weblogs in news organizations. Kovach & Rosenstiel's highly regarded book, The Elements of Journalism, makes transparency a fundamental property of the journalistic process. Weblogs can be a convenient and cheap mechanism by which a news organization can demonstrate more transparency. A web based ombudsman could react almost instantaneously and in much more depth than the editorial page would allow. Motivated newsroom staff could also use weblogs to be proactive instead of reactive. This can lead to an increased reputation, which is generally more profitable.
Let's see some newspaper bean counter or hard bitten ink stained editor argue against that.