Jesse Oxfeld van Editor & Publisher heeft twee artikelen geschreven over de invloed van weblogs op traditionele kranten. Hieronder staan een paar quotes uit beide artikelen:

Traditional news sites need to be there or be square. Some are starting their own blogs, others are (for now) just making their own sites more blogger-friendly. What's coming in 2005 and beyond?

And they're definitely grappling with how to adapt their sites to our current, blogified media world.One basic issue is how newspapers should handle the new readers that blogs and other sources direct to their sites. The New York Times on the Web, for example, is about to embark on a site-wide redesign, driven partially by the new ways people reach online news."We haven't redesigned the site in more than three years," says Leonard Apcar, the site's editor in chief. "In that time there have been a lot of changes in the way people come to The New York Times on the Web. For instance, a good percentage of our readers are not seeing the homepage; they are coming in because of search engines or RSS feeds, any number of avenues — our own e-mails, other links. They're coming in to an article page. Once they get to an article page, we need to redesign how else you engage the site and travel through it."

It makes sense that newspapers want to take advantage of traffic blogs send their way. But do they want to get into the blogging game themselves? After all, blogs can help draw a lot of traffic to their host sites — their constantly updated nature encourages repeat visits throughout the day. The popular liberal political blog Daily Kos, for example, averages almost 400,000 page views per day, according to Sitemeter. Wonkette gets 75,000 per day, and, for New York's media-gossip blog Gawker, the average is 150,000.

"I think there's a real role for blogs in the future of online journalism," says Doug Feaver, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. But how exactly to handle them, he says, "is one of the main questions for mainline news sites." For starters, there's the question of terminology. "We're going to have to call them something else," Feaver says, noting the "baggage" the term carries with some newspaper editors.

» Newspaper 2.0: The Blog Revolution part I
» Newspaper 2.0: The Blog Revolution part II