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NBR labels bloggers “amateur, untrained, unqualified”

July 17th, 2009 by Brad Heap

Okay being offline for the last two days has been a pain as there has been some good news. And this probably the best and funniest piece of news out. However, because of the delay now lots of other blogs are covering this story so I will keep my blog on this short and let the links do the talking. In summary the head of the National Business Review (NBR) has decided to change their news site to a pay per view model rather than free with ads supporting the costs. So far big deal, who cares, I can get my news from other sites.

What has annoyed me and many others though is in announcing the decision he had this to say about bloggers:

And to add to the madness it has been the aggregators that have profited the most from the supply of that free news copy. Worse still the model has spawned a huge band of amateur, untrained, unqualified bloggers who have swarmed over the internet pouring out columns of unsubstantiated “facts” and hysterical opinion.

Most of these “citizen journalists” don’t have access to decision makers and are infamous for their biased and inaccurate reporting on almost any subject under the sun (while invariably criticising professional news coverage whose original material they depend on to base their diatribes).

Say what? David Farrar at Kiwiblog has the best to say about this:

Of course there are many many blogs that are rubbish. But they accordingly have littler readership and little influence.

And that is exactly the point.

This blog has been running for four years and in terms of its global reach it is very small. And I would actually agree that most of the stuff I post on here is probably rubbish, and has little influence. But that is no reason for me to stop posting it. This is my soap box not yours.

And as far as being upset about people linking back and commenting on stories, well that is interesting because by linking back and commenting you are in fact increasing readership not decreasing it. I actually believe that the move to pay is to keep profits up not keep the bloggers out. Anyway rant over, here are some more good comments (interesting enough all from blog sites, at least two of which are more popular than the NBR website):

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Comment and Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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