Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

There’s a nice feature on Google in the business section of this weekend’s Sunday Times. As part of the article there is a segment on how Google is more than just a search engine, listing a variety of its offerings such as Gmail, Google News and Google Local.

What irked me about the article though was a throwaway comment in the description of Blogger. Rather than being objective about it, the journalists who wrote the article - Paul Durman and Dominic Rushe - seem to use the opportunity to knock blogging.

They write that ‘Some believe that the blogging phenomenon is a publishing revolution on the scale of the printing press, democratising the written word and threatening to put professional journalists out of a job.’ And what do you think they said next? Did they give examples of some of the fantastic blogs out there?

Before you get your hopes up about them being slightly enthusiastic, the sentence is directly followed by ‘That said, most blogs are still unreadable.’

Meow! Saucer of milk for the journalists in question. Rather than focus on how Blogger allows ordinary people to connect with the web, they take a lofty stance and dismiss blogging. Instead of looking at blogging as a form of social networking, they prefer to focus on the hype that blogging somehow threatens their jobs.

I can’t wait until the Business section has a feature on how blogs can help an organisation succeed in their marketplace in the near future.