Blogs and the Media Landscape
A point which comes across several times in the comments, is that blogs are revolutionising the media, and that not everybody is noticing.
"Blogs are having an impact in terms of breaking and analyzing stories," says Morgan McLintic, vice president of Lewis Global Public Relations. "To ignore this dynamic is to ignore changes in journalism and publishing across the globe."
"Blogs are critical in the political and ICT spheres at the moment, in the future, no industry will be unaffected," says Tom Nutt of The Communication Group in London.
There is a fairly consistent view that blogs are a phenomenon that PR PROs have to learn to get to grips with, pretty much like any other new development: "The profession adapted when TV came, it adapted with the internet came, it will adapt for blogs," says Stuart Bruce of Bruce Marshall Associates in the UK.
But there are also fears expressed that blogs have somehow escaped the notice of many in the industry, and may catch PR PROs unawares: "The new generation of PROs at school for the moment are still learning the "old" communication models," says Philippe Borremans of the Conversation blog in Belgium. "The world has changed and their profs don’t get it. I’m sure it is different in the US, but in Europe it is a huge challenge."
One reason given for the power of blogs, is the technology (RSS) which allows readers to subscribe to many unformatted blog feeds and browse quickly from one source to another: "It’s not really about blogs, but about distribution of information. What makes blogs so big? The RSS syndication of the information, which tends to be well written. It’s not the format, it’s the content that matters," says Jeremy Pepper, President, POP! Public Relations, USA.
RSS technology has recently been attracting the attention of venture capitalists, and may give rise to many new applications in the future.
