Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Later in London

I'm on a plane in a few hours (6am, Eastern) for London. See ya there.

Dog feed

I'm in a hotel, so I read USA Today, where yesterday Pet-food scandal ignites blogosphere caught my eye.

Websites that catered to a niche audience have become an important source of news about the contamination of pet-food ingredients exported from China with an industrial chemical called melamine and related compounds. They are contacted not only by consumers but by reporters, lawyers and pet-food manufacturers eager to reach that burgeoning audience.

This kind of networked collaboration of people who share a deep interest is changing the journalism world, said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and writer on online media.

"The people doing this pet food information hunting used to be on the demand side of journalism. But now they have the tools to supply themselves, so that's what they're doing," Rosen said.

More at one of those pet blogs.

Also, don't miss Jay's Twilight of the Curmudgeon Class. Lots of good links. I'll add one more: How to Save Newspapers.

Some curmudgeons do Get It, by the way. For example, here's Jerry Roberts in the LA Times' Blowback Forum, on the News-Press mess.