There’s a fierce debate raging about blogs vs. media businesses and it seems like the wrong conversation. Bloggers can often afford not to make money, or to make a far lesser margin(remember that home office thing?) And yet, fron a consumer perspective, while readers highly value the credibility of news organizations, they also want instant […]

Good discussion beginning here–with slow slowness on the part of blogs.com which we are addressing. Keep posting! We’ll be discussing the blog comments and posts as we move toward the second half of this session.

Howard Reingold points out that discussion is part of news consumption – particularly around major events. Some thoughts: Major events are no longer dominated by TV on the day and print the day after. The extent to which media multi-tasking takes place is underestimated by the media industries. blogs and other online sources are already […]

Echoed by Horwitz (Earning the right to filter your news), Rheingold (certain amount of trust capital) and Klein (the urge to controll the dialogue): Trust is build over a long time – and lost in no time. Hence the urge to control the dialogue, a very sound branding decision for a newspaper brand. Filter we […]

A quick riff on Esther’s point about journalistic ethics: The problems of the world are too complex to be solved by ideologues and oversimplifications. The problem, of course, is that big media is perfectly suited – and actively organizing – for “the big story,” which becoming the simple story. At the same time, standards for […]

Wilkinson mentioned “controlling the dialogue”. Right there, he taps into the most consequential split between blogs and traditional media. For the politician, blogs are absolutely uncontrollable; they are an intrinsically chaotic medium with a penchant to move towards all out conflict. The informal, almost personalized feeling of blogs creates a different reaction in the viewer […]