Can Corporate Blogs Fill the Demand for News?
August 26, 2008 5:57 PM | Written by Yan Shikhvarger
Several month old PR Week survey appealed to me in a new way when looked at from an angle of corporate blogging. To take a step back, the piece of research relevant here is the Media Survey 2008 (download pdf) and it focused on the evolving job of a journalist. It had interesting numbers for many questions: yes, journalists go to the company website for research (89%), and yes they use Google (73%), and yes 45% use blogs, 29% are on Facebook, and so on and so on....
One of the more interesting insights however, is the overall change in the nature of the profession and the pace of story output. A journalist mentioned in the study that "the fervent pace kept by bloggers - both amateur and professional - means reporters who have been filing dispatches at the same pace for decades now must work at a speed once reserved for wire correspondents." The traditional outlets introduced their own blogs to create a new content vehicle and to keep up with Gawker, Gizmodo, The Huffington Post, and Co. So perhaps there is a bit of weariness in WSJ's Health blogger, Scott Hensley's quote: "We post eight to 10 times a day. We try to have three up by 9am; a half-dozen by noon. 'When I was writing for print ... I wasn't even thinking about what a possible story would be most days by 10am.'"
As the value of corporate blogs is constantly rehashed, another benefit they create is its place in this environment. Not every corporate development needs a press release and a blog is the perfect format to get that out into the world. Frequency of output is a very important factor here and a blog can do that. One company that is doing this very well is GM. Just check out its GM FastLane Blog and its blog friendly social media newsroom.
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