Accidentally on Purpose Blog

Alana Samuels at The L.A. Times notes (online subscription is free) that mainstream newspapers are finding ways to incorporate blog content on their sites.  More specifically, she also looks at how papers like The Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, The Guardian (UK), and USA Today are sharing revenue with bloggers.  Doubtful that anyone is making serious money under these arrangements, but that’s not the point.  There’s mutual benefit — newspapers need more relevant content, and bloggers need …  well, let’s go to the article to see what they need:

“Some popular blogs have been ‘absorbed’, to use the New York Times’ term, into mainstream media sites. Freakonomics, a blog about economic thinking in everyday situations, runs on the New York Times site, and its authors share the ad revenue.

“Stephen J. Dubner, a Freakonomics coauthor, said the partnership provided an opportunity to be featured on one of the most prominent newspaper sites in the world ‘with all the readership and support that comes along with it’.

“The blog gets more traffic on the Times site than it did when it was accessible only at Freakonomics.com, he said. Unlike before, now it can make money.
“With the funds, the Freakonomics authors are sprucing up the blog, adding a full-time editor and filmmaker.

“Most bloggers are paid little, if anything, for the thousands of words they type. Teaming up with a newspaper is a way to establish credibility, said Dave Panos, the CEO of Pluck, which distributes blog content to a handful of newspaper sites, including USA Today’s, through a service called BlogBurst.

“‘Being picked up by the mainstream media’, he said, ‘is the highest form of flattery’”

I’m not sure that all bloggers would agree with that last statement.  But I do think that attention economics — which are not entirely based on $$$ — might begin to bring about a friendly truce between the mainstream media and bloggers.

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