Can Mainstream Media Counter Growing Popularity of Blogs?
Posted on April 28, 2005
BusinessWeek's Blogspotting blog raises an interesting question as to whether the mainstream media has an overall strategy to counter the growing popularity of blogs. Blogspotting argues that they are not one big MSM but a collection of individual journalists and media outlets. Blogspotting's Stephen Baker writes:
I would argue that instead of one big homogeneous power group -- MSM -- we're a very diverse collection of individuals and institutions. The vast majority of us responds much more to the day-to-day challenges of our lives: Pushing story counts up, trying not to get scooped, writing front-page stories (which feel like insurance in these days of shrinking advertising and staff cutbacks).That is a good explanation. There are lots of different media companies and many publications, newspapers, etc. And Baker is correct that individuals at these companies have certainly been through a great many staff cutbacks over the past few years. At the same time there are some very large media companies that could organize a strategy for or against blogging if they wanted to, but they couldn't stop blogging itself and currently don't appear to be trying to do so. The strategy emerging from media companies both large and small appears to be both to join the blogosphere and to cull it for information.
If you check many of the larger MSM websites most of them now have blogs or blog-like features. And if you search Google News or Yahoo News for blogging you get many, many more search results for stories in newspapers than you did just a few months ago. However, some bloggers argue that the MSM will never really be able to join the blogosphere because many bloggers are not beholden to advertisers and shareholders and don't ever intend to be. Juan Cole, who writes Informed Comment, explains here.