June 3, 2003

Taking Blogs Seriously

The PR industry is starting to take blogs seriously. But not all blogs. Just blogs by "accredited journalists."

MediaMap, the industry leader in delivering Communications Management (CM) solutions to corporate communications departments and public relations agencies, today announced that it will begin adding information about weblogs and their authors to its media directory available through its award-winning application, MediaMap Performa.

"Weblogs are quickly becoming a popular way to exchange information among media professionals, particularly journalists," said Ed Foster, author of the GripeLog weblog available at http://www.gripe2ed.com or through InfoWorld's Web site at http://weblog.infoworld.com/foster/. "Reporters use weblogs to cover interesting stories that primary outlets such as mainstream magazines and newspapers may pass up. weblogs are also being used by opinion-makers, both journalists and their sources, to quickly and interactively explore controversial topics in depth."

"Weblogs are new influencers on the PR landscape that can often result in quick, electronic ink for corporate communication professionals," said Ruth Habbe, executive vice president, MediaMap. "As more and more corporations depend on non-traditional media, blogs will continue to grow in importance. As an industry leader, MediaMap continues to listen to the needs of our clients and offer solutions that will help them improve overall corporate communications results."

MediaMap will cover blogs written by accredited journalists in the MediaMap North American Media directory, and provide its customers with tips on how to best communicate with each blogger.

Second: the best ways to communicate with bloggers are usually: email, the comments board if the blog has one, and starting your own blog and linking to them. Third: why only "accredited" journalists? Oh. Because you still have this mindset that only Big Journalism can do journalism, and haven't figured out that blogging tools have lowered the cost of publishing almost to the vanishing point, democratizing journalism and beginning to alter it in very fundamental ways so that journalism is not longer a top-down, one-way, non-interactive, form of spreading the news and the standard approach of feeding PR into the media machine isn't going to work as well anymore when bloggers can fact-check, discuss, debate, add to, expand on, comment on, and otherwise dissect the news, rather than just passively accept what Big Journalism tells them is true.

UPDATE: JPReardon's blog is pointing to some more more blogged thoughts about PR and blogging, including one that explores whether the "strong synergy between journalism and blogging" means "there should also be a strong synergy between PR and blogs" and says PR is generally "clueless" about blogs - as evidenced by the PR-ic notion that you can "pitch" bloggers on story ideas.