Well, yes and no. Professional bloggers still get vastly more press than they do money, as I discuss in some detail here:
http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be-a-p... in relationship to a WSJ article not dissimilar from the one in The Atlantic. Furthermore, notice that, as The Atlantic says, only 21 of 50 of the top blogs belong to corporations. In a glass-half-full way, it's fairly impressive that so many blogs _aren't_ corporate.
Anyway, the thoughts on the "rise of the professional blogger" have been around in different language since at least the late 1990s, as Scott Rosenberg's book _Say Everything_ observes; I wrote more about the book here: http://jseliger.com/2009/09/20/say-everything-how-blogging-b... .