Sometimes I just have to say, “what the fuck?” and the royal we doesn’t work as well. These are my thoughts—raronauer

Perhaps because the blog industry started as a forum for Midwesterners to write eulogies to their cats, people are still having trouble taking blogs seriously. Last time I saw my extended family, the follow-up question to the news that I was working for a blog was, “and you get paid for that?”

Yes, I don’t wake up at 7 for kicks.

A lot has changed about the blogging industry. Sure, there are still a lot of cat bloggers, but there are also talented and engaged journalists out there who prefer to do their reporting in their pajamas.

But it seems like every week or so, there’s an article, or just as likely, a blog post, about whether bloggers are journalists or something to that effect. But at this point, it’s pretty obvious that there is good, original content to be found in blog form.

So today’s LA Times story about newspapers adding outside blog content to their sites struck me as well, duh.

Newspapers are cutting down their distribution and staff, and pouring money online. Adding an outside blog is an easy way to get content online. Since the deal is usually to split ad revenue, newspapers aren’t risking that much by making outside content available on their site.

The surprise may be that blog content is actually good. But this is 2007, not 1999. Let’s get with the blogs.