- That McKeating is rather good on newspaper columnists, blogs and the like. I may expound on this myself at some point, beyond my mere interjections in the comments there.
From what I can tell, we're beginning to see a new phase emerge in the media's response to blogs. From "hey, cool - blogs prove that EVERYONE wants to be a journalist, and therefore we're skill", they're beginning to realise that us bloggers could be a threat. Not to newspapers or TV news, obviously, but to the vastly overpaid opinion-mongering columnists, who rake in £100k+ per annum while the lowly staff journalists who do all the legwork of bringing us actual NEWS are lucky to hit the national average wage, despite infinitely longer hours and far high stress. Bloggers will never be able to do the latter better than the proper media (although there's no reason why an online-only newspaper couldn't work, given enough funding in the set-up phases) - but opinions are ten a penny, and there are already hundreds of bloggers out there who I'd far rather read than a Polly Toynbee or a Simon Jenkins.
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Some bloggers, at least in the States, are doing the legwork of lowly journalists. You see folks here who go to local government meetings, interview politicians afterward, and then blog about it afterward. The only people reading it are the real local-politics junkies, though.
Blogs don't compete evenly with newspapers, and probably never will, because they're a whole different animal. But the traditional media is feeling the heat, and scrambling to catch up - particularly in the opinion/column/letters to the editor category, as you mention.
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