BillHobbs.com is a frequently updated blog of original reporting and commentary by Bill Hobbs, a longtime Nashville journalist and media relations adviser. I am currently serving as communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, a job I began on Oct. 29, 2007.
Knowledge@Wharton has a very good article looking at rising competition - and the fragmenting audience - in the business of business journalism (broadcast and print). The impact of blogs on business journalism gets a pretty good discussion...
Knowledge@Wharton: Let's take a somewhat different tack. There has recently been the emergence of what we call "citizen journalism," with the rise of blogs and the whole blogosphere. Is that affecting business journalism, and if so, how is it affecting each of your organizations?
Barroux: It is, because everybody, to their ability, can be an expert, and I think maybe we're in a transitional period where we are seeing this explosion of blogs. But if you look deeper -- and as reporters, we have to look into the details of many stories -- you realize that many blogs keep on saying the same [things]. They repeat themselves.
And maybe one of the future outcomes could be for people like us to just build on our brand and say we can help readers get to the relevant information. Our future job may be to try to know which blogs give the best information, and we will have to bring that to the public. We can be some kind of a filter, which we do today. We have to learn how to be the filter in a new environment where there is much too much news available and the readers' time is precious. It's new so it's fun, but I guess [readers] will want us to play that role again in the future.
Jablonski: You're going to approach certain business stories pretty traditionally, waiting for confirmation on something and trying to reach out to your sources to get something confirmed. What's been fascinating to me recently was the last big Apple meeting in San Francisco where Steve Jobs was announcing these new iPods; this was on our radar, and all you really had to go on was all these techie blogs.
They had been following this so intensely -- "The last time this sort of vibe was put out, this happened, so..." -- [offering] details that people reading traditional media wouldn't otherwise pick up on. More and more now we've got an eye on it, because obviously something's going to happen. It was just interesting to cull so much of that [coverage] from people offering these blogs, and really following something in a way that we wouldn't be able to [otherwise]. It definitely comes into play.
Plus, there's good advice for journalism students at the end of the piece. And if you don't want to read the whole thing, there's an audio file so you can listen to it instead.
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