Traditional media ‘could crush’ blogs

Victor Keegan writes in the Media Guardian about sites like Digg, blogs and social editing of news stories.

In the article he looks at how the world as a whole and not just the media industry is changing through democratisation - that as technology gets easier and cheaper not only are users creating their own content but they’re publishing it too.

I was with him up to this point, I thought the way he was talking about the wisdom of crowds in editing the stories and how newspapers could do well to look at these sites, was spot on.

However, he then starts to get a bit old media like as he looks back to the Today newspaper and how other more established papers in the UK crushed it by adopting it’s technology.

He’s basically saying papers can do the same to sites like Digg by adopting a similar facility for user editing or by newspapers blogging.

The one thing that did interest me about his article was near the end (get past the crushing references) and he makes some interesting points about how a site with a strong brand (such as The Guardian, The Times & even The Sun) have the ability to survive in a fully democratic media world by adapting to the users desire for control but by playing on their own strong content and the fact that they have a trusted brand.

I basically agree with him in that the established, trusted brand have a strong edge over sites like Digg - mainly because of the fact that they have the content that is linked to most by sites like Digg - but also because they have the marketing budget, user base, brand and content to keep people coming back.

After all if you go to digg, see a story you’re interested in - the most prevelant link is the one to the newspaper, blog or other news site so the users are coming back to you anyway.

If that newspaper than gave the users a similar facility to Digg (let them vote up a story they like and comment on it) you might find them not going back to Digg.

read more | digg story

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