Today, there is hardly a newspaper, magazine or
broadcast outlet that does not have a prominent blog destination where
reporters, columnists, critics, anchors and other media personalities
can supplement their day-to-day output with more informal musings.
Of the many interactive features of the top 100 newspaper and
magazine Websites in the US, reporter blogs rank near the top, as do
comments on blogs, according to a study by the The Bivings Group. A full
95% of the top 100 US newspapers now offer reporter blogs (up from 80%
in 2006), while 58% of the top 100 magazines provide this service.
A limited-scale Prospero Technologies study from late 2007 found
that 78% of US businesses that use social media applications included
blogs for their editorial staffs. This was the top-ranked category in
the survey, ahead of other popular features like discussion boards, RSS
feeds and customer reviews.
Although news stories have broken on blogs—notably the Rathergate
scandal, which led to CBS news anchor Dan Rather’s ouster from the
network in 2005—reporters use blogs less as a news platform than as a
way to connect with their readers and check up on the competition.
In a survey of US journalists by PR Week, PR Newswire and Millward Brown, 57.7% of respondents said they used blogs to measure
sentiment, and 51% used them to gauge how their competitors were
covering stories. Fewer journalists—less than 30% of respondents—used
blogs as a mechanism to dig up sources.
Other research confirms the relative lack of importance of blogs as
a hard-news medium. A survey conducted by Synovate for the Marin
Association of REALTORS found that only 3.9% of US adult consumers
regarded blogs as a news source. This response rate put blogs squarely
at the bottom of the list in that study.
Similarly, a 2007 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press survey ranked online news discussion blogs near the bottom of a list of
news sources used regularly by US adults. Only conservative commentator
Rush Limbaugh’s radio show scored lower than blogs in the Pew survey.
To
learn how marketers are using blogs, get your copy of the
new eMarketer report, The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement from Grass Roots, today.