AOL v Digg / Marketing and PR Digg-a-likes / Bloggy newspaper readers: this week’s PR Business column
8 responses to “AOL v Digg / Marketing and PR Digg-a-likes / Bloggy newspaper readers: this week’s PR Business column”
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Trust is THE issue when it comes to blogs (http://floaterinthememepool.blogspot.com/2006/05/trusting-times.html).
And lack of trust is purely down to lack of accountability. If you don’t trust a newspaper, you don’t buy it. Ergo, you keep newspapers trustworthy by forcing them to earn your custom.
Blogs just don’t have that same accountability and are therefore inherently more un-trustworthy.
It’s a no brainer.
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Don’t people buy newspapers for lots of reasons as well as trust? Entertainment, distraction, TV information, a free DVD or scratchcard. People don’t all wander down to the newsagent with “must buy something I trust” ringing round their head.
That said, the role of newspapers, especially quality ones, is a lot to do with providing authoritative information, that people do trust.
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Antony, great to see you yesterday. I agree with you about Digg – not just about it being a great site – but that we will see more sites look more like Digg. I would love to see a MSM site allow readers to vote for stories they thought were interesting and to comment along with stories. Only a matter of time… BTW, Digg is now the #4 IT News and Media site in the UK based on visits according to Hitwise. While it is still a tech audience, the concept is ready to go mainstream.
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Blogs and newspapers earn trust – it is that simple.
A site run using blog software can produce regular articles, answer reader’s questions and help people connect with others in exactly the same way as a newspaper or magazine.
I would argue with comments, permalinks and clear ‘about’ pages the author of a smaller, blog-style site is more accountable than many journalists sat in a newsroom.
And I always wonder if people actually know, or care, if they are reading a blog – even the blogosphere can’t make its mind up as to what really constitutes a blog.
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Craig – Yes, blogs engage people in a way MSM cannot. But every piece of research I’ve read to-date shows that people DON’T trust blogs. And trust is a product of accountability. So how does that square away?
Antony – You’re right. Trust is the capital of ‘serious’ media, but not so much in the more mainstream infotainment titles. I need to trust that the Economist has got its facts right. I don’t really care if Nuts misquotes a vacuous interviewee.
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Good point, Craig – and people will care less when what they are reading is peer-reviewed/recommended by a community they belong to, like Digg. TechCrunch’s podcast about the new version of Digg has an interesting debate around this point toward the end (about 48 mins in) where the consensus is that good reporters will move over to their own blogs eventually http://www.talkcrunch.com/2006/06/22/episode-10-digg-30-launches-interview-with-founders-kevin-rose-jay-adelson/
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Heather – thanks for your comment. Great presentation you did on MySpace – are you going to post your slides on your own blog, perhaps?
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Anthony – thanks for keeping me honest! Will post those today! :)
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