Good interview with MSNBC.com president Scott Moore. That he sees blogs as symbiotic with news sites means that he gets it.
How has the online news business been challenged by the proliferation of weblogs in the past couple of years?
I think online weblogs actually help the online news business quite a bit. Weblogs are just another factor in the constantly increasing pace of the news cycle. Weblogs by their nature are referential; they certainly almost always point out a new development, the blogger is riffing on something that’s happened in the news. The extent that weblogs continue to grow in popularity means more people are interested in the news and engaged in getting their news online.
Do you find that it brings more people to MSNBC or with the proliferation of all the sources, do people get more scattered? How do you draw in an audience when there are so many new sources each day?
There are more sources, and there are certainly more and more blogs all the time, but people have good bullshit filters. I don%u2019t think anybody would say you could replace a primary news source like MSNBC.com by reading blogs. If they did that, they would be deluding themselves. Some people may be happy to be deluded that way, but most people won%u2019t. I see blogs as derivative of news and if you get interested in blogs, you’re going to be, by definition, more interested in getting news. But there certainly haven’t been any major new entrants into the online news field.