Blogs, not baasi news
Published by Yazad Jal December 7th, 2005 in Web World, MediaBlogs may not be the first place to get breaking news (TV trumps here) but blogs are faster in circulating news. Here’s a small example. Amit Varma points to a good article by Sebastian Mallaby on the auto component industry in Chennai yesterday. The Indian Express republishes it verbatim today.
I think as filter and news blogs get more popular in India, newspapers will be forced to stop circulating authorised copies of articles first published in the US / UK. Blogs filter and link much faster. Good show Amit (and credit to Nitin Pai who first spotted it and circulated it via email)!
Can I just say “duh”?
IE’s had the content syndication agreement with LAT/WP for the last couple of years at least and the stories have been published a day later (no sensible syndication agreement would allow publication on the same day) for a long time now.
Why the use syndication is a a no-brainer, it is a low cost initiative compared maintaining actual staff there to do crappy stories (look up a famous name “chiddu” for a fabulous example). Bloggers blogging and linking to it won’t make much difference to this since they have to fill up the space anyway with the least amount of effort.
Codey, good point.
Yaz, IE’s content syndication deal will only stop making sense if the readership of filter and news blogs rivals theirs, and that isn’t likely for most of the rest of this decade. And when filter blogging does start getting that kind of readership, you can bet that IE will leverage their offline strengths to build a strong online presence, with plenty of filtering of their own. Whether the filtering they do attracts as many readers as the one that established filter bloggers will by then is open to question, because good filter bloggers, of course, do more than just filter.
Broadly I agree with your general point, of course, but it is a point that is true of the internet as a medium, and not blogs alone.
I’ll add to Amit’s point that they will leverage their existing strengths, both online and offline, by saying that at least one CEO and many more top level management chaps in huge media houses have specifically asked for liking and displaying content that is not theirs. This is a marked change from the early years when everyone wanted to restrict users to their own crap, the only interesting point being that they don’t call it or know it as Web 2.0 or the Long Tail and all that fancy crap.
How many IE print edition readers read/know about/care about filter blogs?
What is the penetration of Internet in India?
How many Indian newspapers stopped printing PTI/UNI/IANS stories after rediff.com began syndicating them?
I have nearly grown up reading the Indian Express. This newspaper badly needs to be revived because its not the first time IE has lifted off news from blogs. [link]
I don’t know if there is some word for lifting news from a blog and presenting it in the MSM? I’d rather read blogs than pay Rs 2 for a newspaper which is simply reprinting news from blogs? Not that Rs 2 is a whole lot of money, but when a million people are dishing out Rs 2 from printed blogs, its time to think hard about it. Maybe its a way of presenting blog-news to the people who do not use the internet?
Its irksome enough to see cross-posting on blogs. I can imagine how it would be to see cross-posts in the MSM.