Monday, June 27, 2005

Just What the Journalist Ego Needs... "Newspapers are cockroaches. No matter what is introduced into the media ecosystem, the oldest of the Big Media survives..." That's Business Week, spreading joy under a headline that says, "Net to Newspapers: Drop Dead." The industrious folks at the blog called Paid Content pointed to that story today, along with five other recent articles about newspapers and their hope that online editions can draw dollars as well as readers. The most optimistic view is from a Washington Post staffer writing in American Journalism Review, in an issue that also includes a "Dotcom Bloom" story about online news and "citizen journalism" sites. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, OhmyNews International reports on its multinational gathering of Korean "citizen reporters" and counterparts from as far away as Iran, Germany, Brazil and Chile. Reporters from 20 countries attended. 7:10:50 PM    comment [] Blogging for Dollars, Product & Political Promotions From Sunday's Boston Globe: "Yes, corporate America has discovered the blog and found that the grass-roots medium for supposedly unadulterated opinions is also a powerful marketing tool in a country where about 37 million Americans read these online journals." The story reports on bloggers picking up hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for including "reviews" or mentions of products and services in their blogs, sometimes without mentioning that they are being paid. (I'd missed the startling news that someone will be making a living with a blog about the Dukes of Hazard.) Sooz, an old neighbor of mine, is mentioned in the story, and has already blogged a page of corrections to the part of the story about her, particularly the part that says she didn't mention that she was being paid. (She provides an example and says her pages carried this flag during the three-month promotional period.) There's not much detail on paid political blogging in the story, but it mentions a Federal Election Commission hearing on the subject this week. Here's more info: June 3 was the deadline to submit comments, but a PDF file linked to this address includes considerable detail about steps the commission is considering to, it says, "ensure that political committees properly finance and disclose their Internet communications, without impeding individual citizens from using the Internet to speak freely regarding candidates and elections." The well-footnoted Internet rule-making section of that Federal Register PDF is more than ten pages long, after a couple of columns of unrelated proposals concening rural broadband service. 10:06:43 AM    comment []

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