Here is an interesting WSJ article, When Bloggers Make News, that Marc Orchant pointed me to. The WSJ article covers a bit of the Harvard session, Blogging, Journalism and Credibility. I commented more on the conference details and sponsors today in the above post on the Jay Rosen article that served as the session pre-read.
One issue discussed in this session is the practice of hiding stories after two weeks or less that news firms like the Wall Street Journal continue to practice. They do this so they charge money for access to their archives. However, this makes their work less useful to bloggers because the links become broken. It also hides the journalists’ work from Google and other search engines. It will be interesting to see if the article link above disappears.
This practice arose because of the separation of journalists from the business model of the news firm. But now their work is lost to most of the world to their detriment and ours. Some attendees said that soon a paper, likely a small market one, will break with this tradition and open up their archives for free with ads. The first mover here will become a major archive news source for bloggers and others, get lots of traffic that will drive up their ad value, and become the designated source for links to most standard news items. They may also break to hold on archive news and lessen the value of those trying to hold on to their archives.
This move will be another challenge to the revenue streams for traditional news. eBay has taken a bite out of their ad revenue. Now, another revenue stream may go, forcing them to look for new business models.
By the way, the essence of the article is that bloggers are having an increasing impact on news reporting and, as a result, the issue of credibility is being more important. As the article mentioned, “the number of Americans reading blogs jumped 58% in 2004 to an estimated 32 million people, according to a Pew Internet and American Life Project.” The article goes on to cover the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility session dialog over the responsibilities of bloggers as news providers.
I won’t cover all the details of the article since you can go to it and I will review my notes of the session in another post. But go there soon before it disappears. You might want to try to preserve it in another format while it is still available but that is your choice
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