Bloggers-in-Chief: What traditional journalists can learn from bloggers

When I spoke to KQED news editor Bruce Koon last week in my Digital Journalism class at Santa Clara University, he startled me with a prediction. Our topic delved into the dysfunctional relationship between traditional metropolitan newspaper and the blogs that depend on them. 

"This is the one area that worries me the most because even while new solutions or a business models emerge, there could be a period in which journalism and the blogs dependency on it will be hurt," he said. "Doing watchdog journalism requires a lot more capital than what bloggers necessarily have."

His answer was simple: follow something like Huffington Post model and merge the traditional with the contemporary. To elaborate on what the means, Koon suggests hiring bloggers throughout the online world who've maintained notable following and place them side-by-side with traditional journalists in brands capable of investing the necessary capital for investigative pieces that garnish a news company's status yet provides very little revenue.  

Here the news industry is able to merge the new with the old; provide readers a level of interactivity and informality that has come with the blogging world while maintaining the trustworthiness and reputation of century-old newspapers. 

Although the Huffington Post leans much closer to a blog than a traditional news  website, he suggests that major newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, which is currently facing the possibility of shutting its printing press, should have, in the early days of new media, enveloped rather than disenfranchised bloggers. 

But he also reveals that such an idea may be too late. 

"There are dozens of other outlets now and new options for us that the news audience is really fragment."

But I suspect it wouldn't hurt to try.