Bloggers as Opinion?

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One of the few economicsy blogs I read occasinally, was/is the Freaknomics blog. A funny thing happened to it earlier today. As Dubner explains, they moved over to the NY Times opinion page. I've seen examples of newspaper columnists becoming bloggers or just maintaining blogs on the side. This is the first example I've seen of a newspaper basically buying up a website address and bringing famous bloggers into their real estate.

With the state of the newspapers in the US, as they struggle to stay relevant and develop better business models to adapt to consumers preferring the Internet as a news source, this method to acquire talent may be one way to go.

Comments

Anonymous said…
hmm... this has been going on for a while. Bloggers are becoming part of the establishment. Glenn Reynolds writes quite a few op-eds for WSJ these days. Entirely due to his blog, I believe. Similarly, Ana Marie Cox and Andrew Sullivan were bloggers way before they were hired by Time, for which they now blog exclusively.
5:26 PM
salgar said…
Good point. Bloggers being sucked into big media has been happening for a while.

I guess the reason that this one stood out to me is that it wasn't just a talent acquisition (i.e. unlike the others Dubner et Levitt didn't just start writing for the NYTimes in addition to/instead of their blog.) NYTimes effectively bought out the www.freakonomics.com web address, and integrated (reasonably well) the blog into their newspaper site. Unlike the others who effectively write conventional weekly/daily columns (mimicking newspaper columns), these guys will continue to post multiple times a day, and (hopefully) respond to comments.

I think its interesting that the opinion page looks more like a blog rather than the web translation of a newspaper column.

Throwing in the obligatory, gratuitous MBA-ish analogy: this is "takeover and integration", rather than just hiring the competition to be employees.:)

Shoulda been clearer. Thanks!:)
6:45 PM
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