Sean Callahan at B2B Magazine's Media Business has written an excellent feature looking at the potential threat/opportunity weblogs pose for B2B trade media outlets. According to the piece, "few media executives appear threatened by blogs, although they do disagree on the degree of influence this form of publishing may have." It's a must-read for PR pros studying this new world.
Sean covers all the right bases, interviewing Alan Meckler, Pat McGovern, Rafat Ali, Stowe Boyd, Rex Hammock, Mary Jo Foley, and Jim Spanfeller. He also captures the essence of the introduction to Dan Gillmor's book, which I have excerpted below. It's this anecdote, perhaps more than any other, as well as my follow up conversations with Buzz Bruggeman that made me a believer that we are living in a new journalistic era where the readers run the show.
In his online book, "We the Media," Dan Gillmor, who is a blog proponent and practitioner, contends blogging changes journalism from a "lecture" to a "conversation." In his first chapter Gillmor relates a vignette demonstrating this change.
He was blogging in the audience of a conference listening to Joe Nacchio, then the head of Qwest, speak. In his blog, Gillmor described Nacchio as whining about his problems in raising capital and remarked that the CEO was getting rich while his company was losing market value.
Within minutes a reader of the blog, Buzz Bruggeman, e-mailed a link noting that Nacchio had sold millions in stock as Qwest's share price fell. Gillmor, who said others in the conference hall must have been reading his blog, felt a sudden chill of hostility in the room rise toward Nacchio. Esther Dyson, whose company, Edventure Holdings, held the conference, said Gillmor's blog probably had something to do with it.
Gillmor also noted that this vignette demonstrated the communal nature of blogging. "Bruggeman was no longer just a consumer," Gillmor wrote. "He was a producer. He was making the news."
