Are blogs a 'parasitic' medium?
Could the blogosphere survive without the reporting provided by newspapers and TV networks? Online pros tackle the question. — Over the past months, I've heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a …
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'parasitic' framing is the sharpest version of a fight that had been building for months: journalists at industry forums arguing that most blogging adds commentary on top of reporting done elsewhere. It landed eight months after Reuters reported that storytelling, not journalism, drives most blogs — evidence, depending on which side you take, either that blogs never claimed to replace reporting or that they don't.
What makes the question more than name-calling is the asymmetry it exposes: newspapers and TV networks pay for original reporting, while much of the blogosphere consumes it for free. If that dependency is real, the blogosphere's economics rest on someone else's cost structure.
First-order effects
- The critique forces a split within the blogosphere itself between blogs doing original reporting and blogs whose output is commentary on newspaper and TV coverage — with the latter now defending their value explicitly rather than by default.
- Newsrooms gain a rhetorical weapon in negotiations over how their work is used online, since 'parasitic' reframes linking and excerpting as extraction rather than promotion.
Second-order effects
- If publishers accept the dependency argument, expect pressure to charge for or restrict reuse of their reporting — turning attribution and excerpting from courtesy into a bargaining point.
- Bloggers who want to escape the label have an incentive to produce primary-source work themselves, raising the cost base of a medium whose low cost was its core advantage.
Third-order effects
- The underlying question is structural: if commentary scales cheaper than reporting, who funds the reporting layer the whole ecosystem reads? The 2007 debate is an early statement of an attribution-and-economics problem that outlives the blog format.
- Whether blogs mature into a distinct journalistic institution or remain a distribution layer over legacy reporting becomes the test case for every later medium built on top of someone else's newsgathering.
The trend: Online publishing is splitting into a paid reporting layer and a free commentary layer, and each new format forces a fresh reckoning over who pays for the original work the second layer feeds on.