Web content for newspapers online has been limited to repeating what paid staff writes for the print editions of their papers or material coming from one or another of the wire services to which the parent organization subscribes.
We're all familiar with seeing Associated Press or Reuters stories running in our local paper and posted online at various news organizations. Imagine a news wire service for blogs which could syndicate your blog to appear on online news sites. A new service called BlogBurst has emerged to help bring blogging and news together on the web sites of major media.
http://www.blogburst.com/
Blogburst makes the writings of a select group of bloggers available to news organizations by aggregating the musings of selected blog writers into a feed made available to major papers. The news organizations can apparently choose from among the topic areas and bloggers offered via the BlogBurst feed.
Some bloggers have launched news commentary blogs with groups of bloggers commenting on news. There already exist several attempts to popularize what has become known as "Citizen Journalism" by such notable groups as "We the Media and Dan Gillmore's Bayosphere which seems to have been taken over by BackFence. Relevant links below:
http://wethemedia.oreilly.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism
http://www.bayosphere.com/blog/dan_gillmor/
http://sf.backfence.com/bayarea/index.cfm?mycomm=BA
What is often lacking for bloggers who provide commentary on the news is an audience. Those experiments mentioned above have been available on small sites, which are otherwise unknown to the world. Struggling to gain readers is the bane of blogging, since people can't read what they don't know exists.
Some well known bloggers have found their audience through writing compelling content and being discovered by major media when they break their own news stories. Others gain that audience through connections or through fame, but most bloggers toil away daily for the pure love of a topic while gathering small and loyal followings.
BlogBurst promises to make web content from the blogosphere discoverable by the media by limiting the availability and vetting the sources, so accuracy and truthfulness is maintained and the blog can be trusted. It's an interesting experiment and may be the route to bloggers earning a living from their blogs by gaining an audience they previously had little access to - major newspaper web site visitors.
Since unknown bloggers appear to need the media in order to spread the word (becoming well known in the process) and newspaper web sites appear to want blogs associated with their site, BlogBurst is filling that need. Since a lack of income is what haunts many bloggers hoping to earn from their commentary, BlogBurst will allow those bloggers to both reach an audience and capitalize on their own traffic via their own advertising, whether that is Google Adsense, Blogads, or some other agreement with individual advertisers.
News sites have launched blogs written by volunteers, some have offered staff journalists a blog, others have tried allowing "Comments" from readers. But volunteers appear unreliable, staffers have little incentive to blog without pay and comment sections are subject to abuse by comment spam. ZDNet is currently offering bloggers in popular technology topic areas and is apparently providing payment from advertising revenue generated by those blogs.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/
BlogBurst is taking an interesting approach by offering online news organizations filtered and verified news commentary from bloggers. Presumably, this content will be available directly on the news sites, such as the Washington Post, Gannet News sites, San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle news sites.
BlogBurst is reviewing proposed blogs currently and will announce the engagement in a live trial with major news sites in May. Will the love of blogs by major media result in a spring wedding? BlogBurst appears to be offering to serve as minister to a marriage made in heaven. Stay tuned, to see if this will be a long lasting marriage.
Mike Banks Valentine blogs on web content developments at http:// weblogs.publish101.com and on web content and on privacy issues for privacy blog http://PrivacyNotes.com/privacy_blog/ He runs web content distribution site http://Publish101.com