I am not usually in the habit of responding to opinions in other publications but a recent piece by Trevor Butterworth for the Financial Times on the state of blogging has caught my attention.
This exception comes because Trevor and I were in the same class at journalism school in New York and he invited his old schoolmates to give him feedback.
His piece, 'Time for the last post', raised some very valid points about whether blogging is having any impact and represents the threat to mainstream media (MSM) that journalists make it out to be.
His chief complaint seems to be that just a handful of bloggers have sizeable audiences and, therefore, influence: just two blogs attract more than 1 million visitors daily. The figure drops after that, with the 10th-ranked getting around 120,000 visits and the 100th-ranked just 9,700 visitors. Compare this with a typical newspaper website attracting more than 1 million visitors a day and it is easy to conclude that blogs just do not hold sway.
Add to this the 27.2 million blogs in existence at the time Trevor wrote his story and 30.4 million as of yesterday. Who is reading when so many people are writing?
There is just too much 'noise' out there to sift through.
