"Despite a lot of growth and mainstream media press, data suggest blogs have a long way to go to match the mainstream media in reach and influence.
"One thing bloggers are most interested in reporting is how important they think bloggers are," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit that's researching the Internet's influence. "Bloggers have influenced some media coverage, but the mainstream media still dominate what's going on.
"Blogging is still something that only the most elite Internet users do, and blog reading is done mainly by the most experienced Internet users. It's a small part of the population." [... read the rest of the story]
-Brian Deagan writing in Investor's Business Daily.
|
||||||||
|
Gemini Award-winning reporter David Akin is the National Affairs Correspondent for Canwest News Service and is based at the CNS Parliamentary Bureau in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Contact information for Akin. Subscribe to this blog using your favourite feed reader: 
Search
This Month
Categories
Who pays for this blog? I receive no fees, considerations, etc. etc. for the posts on this blog nor do I have any plans to accept any. My salary is paid by Canwest Global Communications Corp. I work for that company as the Ottawa-based National Affairs Correspondent for Canwest News Service. The blog publishing platform used here is called Blogware and it's developed by Tucows Inc. of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Blogware users typically pay a monthly fee for using this platform but I do not as Tucows has kindly provided me with this platform. I may report on Tucows, its associated operations and executives, and on industry issues that may affect Tucows. I am grateful for Tucows' assistance but that's it. No favours were promised for their generosity nor do Tucows executives expect any. I hold no direct equity or stock in any company, Tucows included. If you think other disclosures are appropriate in this space, I'd like to hear from you. All of my contact details are always at www.davidakin.com You can read more about this section Login
|
[What they said] Blogs have little influence or effect on mainstream media
Comments
Re: [What they said] Blogs have little influence or effect on mainstream media
by
Anonymous
on Thu 06 Jan 2005 10:26 AM EST | Permanent Link
David,
It's really just an observation from a pretty regular blog reader, but my feeling is that blogs often are the catylst for major news stories. It's pretty clear that the major networks, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN read the news blogs regularly and follow up on stories that are going around. The biggest example is the "Rathergate" issue which was discovered and pushed by bloggers before being caught by major networks, who were loathe to pillory one of their own. Brian Re: [What they said] Blogs have little influence or effect on mainstream media
by
DavidAkin
on Thu 06 Jan 2005 10:07 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link
There's no question that the bloggers at Powerline got Rathergate going. But once they got it going, it was the rest of the mainstream media that really took Rather down. NBC, ABC, the NY Times, the WashPost and others put some of their top investigative teams on the story to shoot holes in the CBS story as fast as they could. That's one of the reasons the week-long delay before CBS admitted it was wrong was so strange: The mainstream media took about two news cycles to destroy the story while CBS stood by the shredded story in the face of overwhelming evidence from its peers.
And besides -- one notorious success like this does not a trend make. Are there other 'big stories' that bloggers are breaking? I just took a look at the dozen most recent items on Powerline (I'm counting back from this item criticizing Democrats)and nine of them are riffs off of items that first appeared in the mainstream media. Two others are riffs of stuff appearing in other media. The other one is a response to an earlier post at the blog and that earlier post was a response to something appearing somwhere else. Where's the original reporting, aggressive fact-checking, and digging? I don't mean to single out Powerline and I don't mean to sound snippy -- I'm just curious for more examples of bloggers breaking stories that affect a whole lot of people. |
|||||||
|
||||||||
