From Blogosphere To MSM

Kate Allen has expanded her piece in The Thundebird on the role of bloggers in our last federal election campaign and it appears as "Federal election gave bloggers the taste of blood". In it I muse as follows:

Murphy thinks downsized newsrooms and lack of time mean that reporters don’t have the resources to look into the kind of stories he is breaking. His relationship to the traditional news media is cooperative, rather than competitive. “You’re hoping the mainstream media is going to pick up on something you do and broadband it,” he said.

In practice, a Canadian bloggers best shot at getting material into the MSM (unless perhaps you're working as an unpaid word-slave for The Post) is via National News Watch. If you ever discover and blog about something that appears news worthy, I strongly suggest emailing "Paul" (if I remember his name right) and letting him know. As Kady O'Malley has written, if National News Watch has it, then the MSM has it (because journalists all read the NNW). It also helps if you can arrange the post to (more or less) resemble a news story. When Cherniak was still writing, it always used to bug me because he would have information nobody else had access to, but would stick it in the 2nd to last paragraph in a boring long post about something else entirely.