Ketchum Senior Partner and CEO Raymond L. Kotcher had a nice piece in today’s Barks & Bites of the Bulldog Reporter (”Old and New Media Will Coexist, but Traditional Reporters Must Begin to Consider Bloggers as Trade Journalist Sources“).
He opens with:
Letâs get real. New mediaâblogs and other Internet sites, podcasts, RSS and the likeâwonât replace traditional media. Mass media wonât vanish. The old and the new simply will continue to coexist and even coincide.
But, then he goes on to give bloggers a bit too much credit:
Most (bloggers) are experts, self described or otherwise, in the field they focus on and many, like trade journalists, are first to break important news scoops or identify fresh trends.
Traditional journalists are beginning to find they must compete against bloggers for scoops.
No. Traditional journalists don’t really have a lot to fear from bloggers about being scooped. Yes, bloggers will break news every once in awhile. But, most bloggers are not journalistic-oriented. They are focused on an industry or subject. And, because of that, with newsrooms being more and more understaffed, bloggers will scoop their journalistic brethren. But, rarely.
He, rightly, goes on to talk about the need for journalists — and those in PR — to build relations with bloggers. The key word? Relationships. It’s through mutually respected relationships that you truly build success.
One word of caution for journalists: If you use bloggers as story sources, please, please, PLEASE as you do with other sources, verify when you can. It’s too easy to blog. So, it’s awfully easy to set up a blog with a certain political or other objectives. So, don’t take a blogger’s word as the gospel.
Journalists don’t just need to be first with a scoop. But, journalists do need to be accurate.
– Mike
Technorati tags: journalism, bloggers, Ketchum, public relations, PR
