Tomorrow I will be at the The Heritage Foundation as a member of the panel for this event – Dan Rather is Retiring: Is the Blogosphere the New Media Establishment?. Matthew Sheffield (RatherBiased), Paul Mirengoff (aka Deacon) from Powerline, and I will join host Mark Tapscott in a panel discussion on blogging and the media.
One of the items I’ve been working on for my portion of the presentation is a look at blogs versus traditional media web sites. Using John Hawkins rankings of The Top 125 Political Sites on the net as a base, I added the web sites of selected newspapers to the ratings to see how the top trafficked blogs stack up.
Here’s what it looks like.
You’ll note that several blogs rank higher than mid size daily newspapers and some are pushing the sites of papers in the top 50 (by daily circulation). The data suggest that the question isn’t. “when will blogs ‘arrive?; but rather “blogs HAVE arrived, what now?”
If you want answers to that question you’ll have to tune into to the webcast Friday morning at 11:00am (Eastern).
Enjoy the MSM most-mortem
er, make that post-m 😉
It’s almost like the breakout of the gate of a horse race as someone like Rather gets flushed down the ratings commode.
I don’t think blogging will be the new media establishment however.
The premise is silly in a lot of ways. Blogs can only check things out deeper and with greater layers of analysis than the media, but we can’t replace them without becoming them.
We could become the new punditocracy, however!
Well, actually, I think the topic is quite pertinent and certainly an interesting one to my read.
Blogs are now regarded as viable aspects to communications media, so, biggest question is — after that hurdle cleared, which it has been, thanks to the Rathergate culmination of coverage — all the fine tuning that needs to now occur, or doesn’t, and why or why not, relationships or not to ‘other’ media (hmmmm…something about the lack of symbiosis as to relationship there works better for bloggers)…
Anyway, Kevin, good luck and best wishes. The event should be really interesting, and I’ll certainly listen in. Hope that you can make links available afterward for a taped and/or printed transcript, too.