Jason Kottke has taken a nice analytical approach to the competition between mainstream media (especially the NY Times) and bloggers for the attention of the public.
Googling the top eight stories of 2005, he shows that blogs and citizen media often top the mainstream media. His analysis is dead-on: citizen media is winning the race, one reason this is happening is that their stories are persistent and designed to be linked from the get-go, the NY Times is squandering its Google credit (a PageRank of 10!), and citizen media are becoming indistinguishable from the “professional” media.
His discovery that CNN (with a PageRank of a mere 9) routinely trounces the Times on Google is yet another indication of why subscription barriers and archives in paid databases may generate more cash in the short term, but can be bad strategy in networked media.
Originally published on my blog at JupiterResearch.