Blogs Will NOT Save Old Media

Michael Arrington declares that BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media. To suggest that the lack of blog content is all that ails Old Media is deeply naive. Old Media needs to follow bloggers into the new content creation frontier, but that in itself will NOT solve the problem of business models.

I will give BlogBurst credit for the understanding that the blogosphere needs a human filter to extract value.

But why do publishers need BlogBurst as a middleman? Why can’t publishers hire an editor whose job it is to go out into the blogosphere and pull in the best and most relevant content, which is already easily and freely available through RSS feeds?

Really, despite Michael Arrington’s disclaimer, the headline of his post is such shameless promotion. If TechCrunch is going to maintain it’s reputation, Michael needs to maintain his critical eye and resist the temptation to act like a boxing promoter.

I should close by making it clear that my skepticism does not diminish my interest in BlogBurst — I’m all for exploring new models and new approaches. And if BlogBurst can bridge the gap between Old Media and New Media, then more power to them.

It’s the over-promising and hyping that I object to (i.e. my issue is with Michael, not BlogBurst).

UPDATE
Ian Forrester points out in reference to my question about why publishers need a middleman to leverage blog content:

Agreed, but for some reason this does not happen. I can’t work out why, theres already enough tools to keep a track of whats going on in a given subject and RSS can make these things more automated.

And he’s right, of course. Perhaps most Old Media publishers do need to outsource this function, and BlogBurst will be able to capitalize on their laziness or inability to evolve. Perhaps it makes sense to have someone specialize in editing blog content, but that would suggest that blog content stays over here and Old Media content stays over there, which doesn’t make much sense either. I will say that BlogBurst’s outsourcing has the advantage of being a solution for publishers right out of the box, which certainly has its advantages.