Kudos to one of our favourite bloggers Dirk Singer of Cow Digital for picking up this classic case of blogger type-casting.
Here we find National Business Review (that’s the New Zealand National Business Review) publisher Barry Colman announcing why they’re charging $150 every 6 months for people to access their content. Firstly he says there’s no business sense in working hard to pay for a newsroom and then giving the content away for free but then he turns his attention on to bloggers.
“Worse still the model has spawned a huge band of amateur, untrained, unqualified bloggers who have swarmed over the internet pouring out columns of unsubstantiated “facts” and hysterical opinion.”
“Most of these “citizen journalists” don’t have access to decision makers and are infamous for their biased and inaccurate reporting on almost any subject under the sun (while invariably criticising professional news coverage whose original material they depend on to base their diatribes).”
Dirk’s polite. He doesn’t point out that there are now online only newspapers (are they blogs) or blogs with direct access to decision makers and that blogs certainly don’t just live by re-cycling mainstream news.
Suggesting that blogs take the news from mainstream and then slag off mainstream for being slow is, of course, to call out bloggers as hypocrites.
He does echo the idea that big brands will have a future while people prefer to read the news from names they trust. Here’s hoping dated opinions don’t begin to drag those levels of trust and relevance down.
We think bloggers play a hugely important role in news and media today. What do you think?
July 16, 2009
Blogging