Blogs as Media Sources

We all know that the mainstream media has had a love-hate relationship with blogs. On one hand, they enjoy nothing better than dissing blogs as the ramblings of amateurs. Meanwhile, many newspapers are busy launching all kinds of blogs, although they aren’t quite sure what do with them.

Another fascinating angle to newspapers’ love-hate relationship with blogs is how blogs are quietly becoming sources in newspaper stories. Some bloggers are being interviewed as experts, while content from some blogs is simply being lifted - with attribution - by reporters looking for sources to support a particular angle.

A good example was a story that appeared in last weekend’s National Post about how Moses Znaimer is building a new media empire aimed at the baby boomer generation. After the obligatory comment from the CEO who’s running Znaimer’s new company, the story features four paragraphs from a public relations executive who writes a blog devoted to boomers called Boomerwatch.ca.

From what I can tell, the reporter did not interview the executive, Lina Ko, but simply and liberally cited a blog post that Ko had written about Znaimer on Sept. 24. Now, there’s nothing wrong with quoting from a blog as long as you provide proper attribution but it was curious to see a reporter do so when it involved a public relations executive, would have loved to have been interviewed.

Clearly, we’ve reached a point where the mainstream media realizes lots of smart people are blogging about all kinds of newsworthy trends and developments. I guess it’s fair play given how often bloggers write posts based on newspaper and magazine stories.

Update: The LA Times looks at how bloggers are increasingly part of the media mix.