New data indicates that blogging is paying off for newspapers. According to Nielsen/NetRatings blogs accounted for 13 percent of overall visits to newspaper sites in December. This is up from four percent in December 2005. Unique visitors to newspapers blogs climbed to 3.8 million.
A few years ago Internet pioneer Dave Winer predicted the New York Times would become one big blog. That may not seem so far-fetched. The Times launched dozens of them. One of their newest is a Question and Answers blog. This is just one newspaper that's getting a lot of mileage out of becoming more conversational.
The media's rush to adopt new technologies like blogs, widgets and others should be applauded. It validates the entire bottom-up movement. None of these technologies were invented by the media. The press simply is a fast follower.
Now, as journalism moves to a two-way modality it's going to force a lot of PR professionals to change their game plan. Stories won't be written and "put to bed." They will be co-written and re-written by journalists and readers together. This will either take place within a journalist's blog or over the ether as a conversation that travels across many of them.
There's a lot of upside in this if PR pros are helpful in pointing out interesting and truthful dialogue and then get out of the way. The key thing to remember is that the primary conversations that shape what the media covers will first and foremost take place between readers and journalists - and not always who we represent. Our job is to connect. Isn't that how it's supposed to be?
