Chris Heisel

Several recent things have gotten me thinking more deeply about blogs.

The first is the announcement that Dan Gilmor is leaving the Merc to pursue an grassroots / open-source journalism effort.

The second was an interesting tidbit from Tom Curley, CEO of the AP:

Delivering a keynote speech at the Online News Association conference in Hollywood, he said a change is taking place right now in which broadband access, Web search, RSS feeds, and weblogs are coming together to “unlock the content from any vessel in which we try to contain it.”

Ever since blogs’ mind-share started rising among the populace and the media, I’ve been noodling their affect(s) and place in the media landscape.

Aside from hard-core traditionalists, who would say “blogging isn’t journalism,” or “blogs, my doctor said I’ve got a benign one of those,” most are inserting blogs into the traditional media circuit.

Take a look at what Curley says about the new “atomic content.”

Curley acknowledged the difficulty of building a new economic model for journalism built around “atomic content,” but pointed to bright spots in the transformation, especially the “emergence of an engaged audience” that can be seen forming around the news in the context of weblogs.

In this case, Curley, and others, are inserting the blogosphere in the feedback portion of that diagram.

But, I think that’s just a rehashing of the old-school “we publish, you listen” model of journalism.

The problem is that blogs are more than just a method of feedback for the traditional media.

So what is a blog, really? What does it mean to the traditional media? Tune in again for more, same punditry channel, same punditry time. (Or check my RSS feed for updates.)