Peter Hirshberg, Executive Vice President of Technorati, the leading blog search engine, currently tracking over 36.7 million sites, sounds off on the move of traditional newspapers, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, towards cultivating an online presence, including the use of video. It will certainly be interesting to see what light the AP Online Video Network brings to the changing fortunes of the newspaper world.
Peter also touches on what the role of reader-generated or community-generated content will be as newspapers move on-line. Peter thinks that there will be a small place for community generated content on these sites, but that it will largely be relegated to community sites. Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, however, showed that user generated content could not only be welcomed by news outlets, it can be invaluable.
Phil Noble, publisher of PoliticsOnline.com has a nice recap of some of the news stories in 2005 that relied on user generated content. Will 2006 be more of the same?
Hirshberg was interviewed on April 6 at the annual meeting of the Arthur Page Society, a professional association of corporate communications executives.
