There was a great piece this morning on the Freakonomics blog by author Stephen Dunbar about the power of blogs. His final quote is this: "The biggest takeaway for me was this: the blogosphere is real in a way that none of us, journalists or economists or parents or cops, could have imagined a few years ago."
The power of the blogosphere became very evident for me last week. It didn't take long for a little opinion piece about destroying a retail block of Troost to build an electrical substation before there were a lot of folks from KCP&L paying attention. I know Mark Forsythe has been contacted many times on topics that he's discussed over at his blog...and Mark and I even jokingly had an "off the record" conversation just yesterday. And I know my traffic pales in comparison to Dunbar's (after all, I haven't written a fabulous book).
As newspapers continue to cut staffing, and work harder at rushing to print press releases faster than the bloggers vs actually researching and reporting on subjects, will further enhance blogs as an important way that people get information...and in some cases, the only way people can find out about certain subject.
I discussed this some last month, but am further and further amazed by the difference some well-educated and written people can have -- and that power is likely to become greater in influencing political and public opinion.
Your wrong. go downtown every week.
Posted by: thepaintman | July 17, 2007 at 11:18 PM
I will admit that I am definitely one to look at blogs to find out what news I am interested in reading. I don't have time to read through the whole paper - nor do I feel like I want to waste my clean fingers looking for the stuff I am interested in. I will never be the blog that one reads to find out what's going on - but I am glad they are out there to incite me to look further into things that interest me and make a difference in my life. (Yours is one of those . . . thanks.) It is the new way to get news - and however dangerous and uncontrollable it seems - it's personalized and focused and un-encumbered. It will be interesting to watch this unfold . . .
Posted by: KC Sponge | July 18, 2007 at 11:15 AM
"As newspapers continue to cut staffing"
I cancel my subscription to the Star because I know of two stories which was printed and it was an out right lie. This happened a couple of years ago. I emailed the editor, nothing happened. I know of another person who cancelled their subscription because of a false story. KC Star keeps falsifying their stories and they wonder why some people get sick of the crap they print.
They need to do reconstruction thru out the company.
Posted by: thepaintman | July 19, 2007 at 12:22 AM
Paintman,
I cut mine a little over a year ago after their inability to accurately cover two different stories...I figured that I knew what happened in both of them, and if that was as close to the truth as they could come up with, I didn't want to be tainted on things I didn't know much about. There are still a couple of good reporters down there, but they're the outlyers now.
The Star's demise can be tracked to being bought by Knight Ridder...which then moved Art Brisbain from the Editor's Desk into a corporate office. That was a sad day for KC...Art was one of the best. It's been a pretty steep decline since then...and McClatchy has made things worse, not better.
Posted by: Brent | July 19, 2007 at 08:16 AM