is it public?

Looking at the blog, Daily Kos, I have a difficult time believing that it truly part of the public sphere. Habermas has said "Because, on the one hand, the society now confronting the state clearly separated a private domain fromt he public authority and because, on the other hand, it turned the reproduction of life into something transcending the confines of private domestic authority and becoming a subject of public interest, that zone of continuous administrative contact became `critical' also in the sense that it provoked the critical judgment of a public making use of its reason. The public could take on this challenge all the better as it required merely a change in the function of the instrument with whose help the state administration had already turned society into a public affair in a specific sense--the press" To me, this quotation meant that the press was the governments compromise towards a publi sphere. If the press is not truely part of the public sphere that brings up new questions such as, what exactly is the press? While I do not quite have an answer to that I feel that Daily Kos may be falling close to the realm of the press. They have paid staff and a set of writers. There is too much of a structure for this to be ompleatly the public sphere. To actually be able to post a diary you must fisrt register and then several differnt steps. There is no where that says this, but this means that only people who are really serious about following this blog would have the time to go through this process.