Mainstream media loves blogs more than they admit
It always makes me laugh when I hear big-time journalists or people involved with large mainstream media outlets trash blogs. They claim that blogs don’t follow the same guidelines that “real” journalists do. Yeah, cause you never hear about scandals involving big publications like the New York Times.
I’m not sure if it’s all an act that they feel they must keep up, or if they don’t realize that many – if not most – reporters from their publications “are cherry picking out interesting stories” from blogs.
In fact, over the last couple of days one of the biggest stories floating around the Net is the rumor that Google is in talks to buy YouTube. The story is everywhere. But it started with a blog posting at Techcrunch. From there WSJ picked it up … LA Times, TheStreet, BusinessWeek, New York Times.
Again, this all started with a blog posting. And what was the headline of this posting? “Completely Unsubstantiated Google/YouTube Rumor.”
Yep, seriously.
Of course, the WSJ will probably say that they read the story and followed up on it, checking their sources, etc. And didn’t publish it until blah, blah, blah. Whatever. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t really matter to me. The fact is they found the story because of Techcrunch.