American Idiotism: Blogs for the Media

The well-known media mogul Rupert Murdoch expressed his new opinion concerning the supposed-to-be rivalry between usually independent blog authors and journalist faction formed by the Mainstream-Media. According to him, the whole battle cannot be fought forever. In order to seek for the end of this struggle, he expects blog authors to contribute and support the journalists to complete the whole coverage of each valuable and expensive day:

At the same time, we may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy — chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve, so long as our readers understand the clear distinction between bloggers and our journalists. (via Blogbar and Newscorp)

But why are these days valuable and expensive? The answer is rather simple. I believe Murdoch realized the uselessness of the whole concept of pay-per-view content (especially for tv and internet) and probably expects more incoming „monkey-money“ from the younger generation if he changes Multi-National Corporation by adapting a „nicer“ public corporate-culture. To adapt this kind of new strategy seems to be one of the first steps… but even if he’s trying to include independent authors within his corporate dependency… what’s going to happen next?