Bazeley Visits the Voce Nation

Cross-posting here to a write up I did on the Voce Nation blog about a recent visit with Mike Bazeley of the Mercury News.  One thing I’ll add here that I didn’t include in the original post was a discussion we had around media transparency, something I and others in the industry have been watching carefully.  Transparency has both good and bad implications for everyone evolved – be it the reporters, the communicators or the companies.  But what does transparency do for the readers?  Part of the answer is that it provides the reader with a deeper understanding and context (e.g., research, interviews, stats, etc) for everything that went into creating the final product (the story), but in this day and age, do people really want that?  Do people really care?  To be continued, here’s the post:

The Voce Nation had the opportunity recently to sit down with Mike Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News and co-author of the SiliconBeat blog to eat pizza, swap stories and share opinions and insights about journalism, public relations and what can best be described as a rapidly evolving media landscape.  In fact, if there was one major theme that colored the entire discussion it was that traditional roles for both the editorial and communications sides of the business are evolving – quickly. 

Mike and his SiliconBeat co-conspirator, Matt Marshall, are part of a growing group of reporters that are redefining the role of contemporary journalism as the mediasphere and blogosphere collide. Unfortunately, at the moment, being out in front comes at a cost, mostly it’s time.  Mike and Matt are pulling double-duty working in their full-time reporting roles at the Mercury News, but also researching and regularly posting original content on SiliconBeat.  In a very short window of time, SiliconBeat has become a rather popular news source for the Valley tech community and with that popularity follows an expectation (err, demand) that a standard of quality and consistency will be upheld – which is a good thing, but all good things come at a cost, or so the saying goes.  It makes us think that as more publications look to integrate big publishing practices with small ones, it seems inevitable that journalist roles will evolve and full-time “bloggers” will have to be seriously considered as part of a regular reporting staff.

PR roles are evolving too, both in terms of how we work with the media and how we counsel clients.  In fact, we spent a lot of time going back and forth on the new tools communicators have available to them to reach audiences.  For example, syndication technology (RSS) has lots of potential, but most companies are only scratching the surface with respect to its application.  Mike even attested at one point that if for no other reason than to avoid the black holes that are journalists email inboxes, companies should explore syndication of their press materials.  We of course also talked about blogging too, the good and the bad and all the stuff that falls in between, and the new role PR is playing within companies as corporate and employee blogs continue to proliferate.  While no hard conclusions were reached, a lot of good questions were raised and everyone walked away from the discussion with a better understanding of the issues and trends shaping the media landscape, oh, and full stomachs too…

Comments

[Jeremy Pepper]

Great interview and post. Thanks for the info.