We Want Media

As more and more newspapers try to carve out a spot in the blogosphere, the Online Journalism Review reports on a system designed to go the other way: bringing the blogs to papers. The BlogBurst method compiles bloggers who meet an established level of quality and makes their content available to the online component of any newspaper.

It’s no surprise that there’s interest in the service from both sides. Simply by virtue of their numbers, it stands to reason that most any topic a paper might want to cover in blog form is already being done better than they could do. And the more content you have, the more ads you can sell.

From the blogger’s perspective, it’s simple. For all the talk about the death of newspapers, they’re still read in greater numbers and hold a higher level of respectability and legitimacy (deserved or not). Simply put: It doesn’t matter how many blogrolls you top; having your work syndicated on the Washington Post’s site is a bigger deal. Oh, and that little thing called money.

But where is this really taking us? Say a blogger is so fantastic that a paper decides it’s better served by hiring him or her to work exclusively for them. Well, that’s a great accomplishment and in some sense a victory for the blog community at large. But if this is repeated dozens, if not hundreds, of times, then where are we? If what makes blogging so great is the freedom and universality of it all, what does it mean when the best of the best are swallowed up by corporations?

Don’t get me wrong. I think this type of blog syndication sounds like a great step towards satisfying both traditional media and bloggers. But when that satisfaction takes the form of content for the former and a bigger paycheck for the latter, I can’t help but worry that we’re starting to swing in a very unwanted direction: the same media conglomeration that made the voice of the blogger so refreshing in the first place.