Blogs: What Next?

Will Blogs Be Able to Replace Traditional News Media?

On Sunday's Reliable Sources on CNN, the anchor and three guests were discussing the failure of Katie Couric, the evening news host, to attract viewers. After all, Couric jumped into the evening news bandwagon with much fan faire and a hefty pay package. Her being the first female news anchor of the 6:30 news cast and her "perky" reputation was taken by many as a charm that would attract viewers.

While there are many reasons viewers are not tuning to CBS for 6:30 news cast, one that seems to be most interesting is that people have changed the way they get news.

Information Technology revolution we are now experiencing means that we don't have to wait until 6:30 in the evening to get the days news. There are hundreds of news websites, blogs and podcasts to get the up to the second news from.

While some media analysts have said that people who still listen to 6:30 news do so for deeper analysis and to put the news into perspective, blogs and news websites are catching up in that area too. If you visit news sites of repute like the NYTimes.com or Time.com or blogs like HuffingtonPost, you can very easily get great news analysis, discuss with other users about the news and may be write a post about it in your blog.

Talking about blogs as a source of information, you must have noticed in the previous paragraph I said that one can get good analysis of news from news website and blogs of "repute". Since when did the maverick world of blogosphere started talking of "reputation"? Allow me to explain.

According to a research note published by Nucleus Research on Blogging, since it is getting easier to start a blog, bloggers are having a hard time attracting audience and keeping them interested. This in light of the fact that of 135 respondents surveyed by Nucleus one out of two people actually read blogs, and those that do only read a blog or two a week. In addition to the difficulty of keeping an audience, there are also concerns about quality and dependability of materials presented. So unless you can show the readers your track record and prove that you are trust worthy, your blog will be standing there alone.