In a recent PR Week article, Lloyd Trufelman, president of Trylon Communications, said “If a blog is going to exist as a commercial enterprise, it’s going to have to track to the same economic rules that govern all other forms of media."
These are the same rules, I assume, that governed vanishing newspaper circulations and network news ratings. The same rules that prompted the New York Times and Knight-Ridder to layoff hundreds of employees, the same rules that prompted Dow Jones to shrink the Wall Street Journal by 20 percent to save on newsprint costs.
With apologies to The Who, the new media bosses are not the same as the old media bosses. The old bosses were close-knit cadres of the rich and powerful; the new bosses are all of us.
I don’t know which blogs will exist as commercial enterprises nor do I care. People Magazine didn’t make money for its first 10 years and no one rang its death knell, so we should cut blogs some slack and let the free market do its thing.
I do know, however, that the rules, economic and otherwise, have changed – not just for new media but for traditional media as well. That’s about all we can predict with any degree of certainty.
Gary Goldhammer -- Strategic storytelling for brands, organizations and executives 
This very much needed saying because blogs are whatever people want them to be….will there be money-making blogs in the future? Sure. Isn’t that why blog companies are being acquired? The value, as you say, is not whether there are commercial opportunities, it’s that what is going on in the world is being defined by us, the bloggers, and less and less corporate-think. The key is that people are engaged and talking about issues and their concerns and their uniqueness; whether it’s putting the family photos online or having a blog by a teenager in angst alongside very cogent, thoughtful and timely blogs on a myriad of subjects, it’s about communicating many sides of anything…from family life to war and all points in between. We can all use a lot more of unfiltered opinions and witnessing! Traditional media has to be in the “new” media instead of giving us more of the same, while they lose audience and ultimately creditibility. Great post!
From A Newspaperman
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