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How Much Do Journalists Rely On Blogs?

Arketi Group, an integrated marketing and public relations consultancy, has some answers in a survey of journalists released last month. I just learned about it via Americablog.

Here are the details about blogs:
-- A whopping 84 percent of journalists would or already have used blogs as primary or secondary sources for articles. (I know I do -- not just (obviously) for Beltway Blogroll but also for Technology Daily.)

-- 60 percent of journalists say they spend more than 20 hours a week on the Internet, and of those, 72 percent say they spend that time reading blogs (I spend far more time than that per week online, much of it either reading blogs or blogging myself)

-- 54 percent get story ideas from blogs (that's probably a weekly occurence for me and sometimes almost daily)

-- 25 percent say that blogs make their jobs easier (definitely true for me).

-- Despite all those positive uses of blogs, only 41 percent of the journalists surveyed consider blogs to be credible sources of information. That is equal to the percentage for activist Web sites and only slightly higher than the 35 percent for politicians. Only chat and message boards rank lower on the credibility scale (18 percent), and public relations professionals scored surprisingly high (77 percent).

-- Journalists use company blogs and industry blogs as secondary sources.

-- The survey also gauged journalists' opinions about company attitudes toward blogs. Fifty-eight percent agree or strongly agree with companies monitoring employee blogs, while 33 percent believe it is ethical for a company to discipline an employee for posting negative comments about his firm on a personal blog.

Posted by Danny | 03:22 PM

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