I have purposely avoided discussing the blogging taking place at the Democratic convention, as there are a lot of people focusing closely on it and they’ll cover it a lot better than I.
However, it was fairly inevitable that the number of bloggers at the convention would raise a red flag to the never ending debate around blogs and journalism.
A New York Times article profiling some of the bloggers at the convention has raised the temperature once again.
“We are taking the remote control out of the hands of the editors, and they don’t like it. It will eat into their advertising, big time. It is no wonder, given what is at stake, that the established priesthood will rail from their pulpits, and make light of what is a truly profound power shift in the making.”
This debate drives me mad. But let’s take it back to first principles for Public Relations. Our job is to effectively communicate with a given audience. If the most effective means of doing that is via journalists we do that, if it’s bloggers we do that. Sometime it’ll be both. That’s all that matters from a pure PR perspective.
Is blogging journalism? In my opinion it is not.
Is blogging a communication medium? Yes it is, if it is being read by your audience.
What annoys me about this “debate” is that both sides treat their audiences as if they are too simple to make up their own minds. That’s not the reality.
The reality is that audiences are becoming more sophisticated and are making their own choices as to what they will and won’t read. They can differentiate between journalism and bloggers. They often read both to get different perspectives.
Please for our collective sanity let it go.
Further reading from the PR Opinions Archives:
- Are Blogs replacing journalism as we know it? Nah…
- Blogs and Journalism the debate continues…
- How blogs, PR and journalism intersect…
- Weblogs and Journalism
- The balance between new media and old media….
Murphy's Law 