Bernie gives a good summary of what the Tribune is saying about IrishBlogs The BoggerSphere idea got a mention and praise was heaped on Slugger O’Toole’s election coverage and rightly so. The energy that’s put into that site is nothing short of fantasitc. Keep reading the Planet of the Blogs feeds as I’ve a feeling a whole new group of journalists are going to be poached from there in the next few months and years. If done right the irishblogs could be the breeding and training ground of the new wave of journalists. as well as other forms of media and it was great to the most powerful man in media embrace the future.
Hopefully the media in Ireland will catch on too as the Tipping Point is coming. Which Irish paper will be first to embrace this and what can we do to further this ?
Free Audio download of Murdooch’s speech.
I love this bit: “But our internet site will have to do still more to be competitive. For some, it may have to become the place for conversation. The digital native doesn’t send a letter to the editor anymore. She goes online, and starts a blog. We need to be the destination for those bloggers. We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented.
At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy — chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve. So long as our readers understand the distinction between bloggers and our journalists, and so long as proper safeguards are utilized, this might be an idea worth exploring.
To carry this one step further, some digital natives do even more than blog with text – they are blogging with audio, specifically through the rise of podcasting – and to remain fully competitive, some may want to consider providing a place for that as well.
And with the growing proliferation of broadband, the emphasis online is shifting from text only to text with video. The future is soon upon us in this regard. ”