Om rants about how bloggers are not given their due by mainstream media, pointing out that in many cases, the “mainstream media” is the “new media” – places like Cnet.com, et al. As he points out, this is as it ever was, blogs represent a new phase of breaking news. Rafat and others have long ranted about how “mainstream” journalists steal ideas and scoops from blogs, and it’s certainly true (Rafat’s example is my story on FareChase, in fact). But I rather enjoy the quiet knowledge that our memes are getting out there into the world, and figure credit comes as credit will come… with time. As more and more folks begin to take their writing and reporting seriously in this medium, blogs will break into various evolved forms, one of them being as a source for legitimate news. I have never really seen this blog as a newsmaking endeavor, I don’t strive to break news. When I do, great, but that’s not the point. I vastly prefer to write the Joints-After-Midnight rants based on analysis of the news….but that’s just me. News-driven sites like Rafat’s and Om’s have a valid point.
(Inside Baseball Paragraph Follows:) Om suggests that T’rati or Feedster create a central clearinghouse for news that all of us can monitor, ideally as an RSS feed. I think that’d be great. Anytime any serious blogger is breaking a story, he or she can ping the service. Presto, we’ve got a record of the scoop. Often times a blogger will see an AP story or News.com story that seems to be the original newsbreaker, and link to that story as the originator. But if that blogger has the newscoop service as well, they’ll know who was the real originator, and credit them. Problem solved. What say Scott, Dave?
Cnet and others have a policy of not linking outside of their own site when it comes to their news stories, instead breaking out external links into ghettoized special sections. This will probably not stand in the long term. The good news is that places like Cnet will evolve far faster than the last time we went round this maypole.