Must Read Article: Are Blogs A ‘Parasitic’ Medium?
This great article just popped up in my Techmeme feed - ‘Are blogs a ‘parasitic’ medium?’. The article opens with:
Over the past months, I’ve heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a “parasitic” medium that wouldn’t be able to exist without the reporting done at newspapers.
I hear the frustration behind the comment. You bust your rear to get stories in the paper, then watch bloggers grab traffic talking about your work. All the while your bosses are laying off other reporters, citing circulation declines, as analysts talk about newspapers losing audience to the Web. It’s not hard to understand why many newspaper journalists would come to view blogs as parasites, sucking the life from their newsrooms.
Although I do think this view does to some extent hold true, I do think that many online news sources have benefited from blogs sending them traffic. I don’t think it’s fair to attribute the fall in newspaper circulations on blogs, as I think that they would have lost traffic to other online sources even if blogs hadn’t been created. For instance, I stopped purchasing newspapers long before I discovered blogging.
To read the full article click here - it’s well worth the 5 minutes it will take.
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Comment by TJP on 4 March 2007:
Blogging is about communicating with other people. I don’t see it as “stealing page views from the big media sites.”
I think people tend to forget that blog really means “personal web log.” Blogs are just like journals.
Is there a better place to organize your thoughts and ideas?