[REUTERS BLOG] Fancy having 500 newspaper editors as Facebook buddies?
Interesting blog by those chaps over at Reuters, the news agency. A bloody big news agency at that.
Thing is, the most interesting point arises from this quote, and then the comment after it.
One glimpse of the future I got was from Didier Pillet, Director of Information at Ouest-France, who believes bloggers are already moving into the heart of news coverage. He speaks for a daily with a circulation of 800,000 that gets something like half its material from so-called ‘village reporters’ — local bloggers. Reassuringly, he told us that they are not envisaged as substitutes for news journalists.
The commenter replies…
The Cairo example does not give a cross section of Egypt. You’re seeing what the technically-inclined population of Egypt worries about, not the other 10 million who don’t have access to a computer. Yes, their worries are quite different.
Exactly. It’s easy to get wrapped up in this blogosphere and think the world revolves around it. It doesn’t. People are going crazy over its 3.2 million members worldwide. That only leaves a few billion then.
Embracing blogs, social networking and other Web 2.0 trinkets is all well and good, but journalists can’t forget how we reach the overwhelming majority of our audience. That’s TV, radio and newspapers (in case you’d forgotten).
