Defending Business Insider´s brand of journalism

Tom Foremski of  ZDNet.com writes that Business Insider´s short stories and blogging is not what ails journalism, it is that journalism doesn´t have the money to produce as much long-form journalism as it has in the past.

Foremski writes, ¨Outsiders don’t know how you are supposed to be do things, they don’t know that some things that they do, can’t be done. For example, journalists would have never invented blogging, or created a news aggregator such as Google News.

¨As a newspaper journalist, you would never republish a rival’s news story in your own newspaper, with your own headline, as a blogger might do; or, collect a bunch of headlines from other newspapers and republish them. That’s not how things were done or supposed to be done, and it’s why many journalists find the current new media landscape so abhorrent.

¨Abhorrent, or not, these are examples of how outsiders can exploit new, disruptive economic pathways, simply due to the fact that they are able to try things out that the incumbents would never do.

¨This is exactly why disruption happens – the old guard can’t do what the young Turks do because they were taught you couldn’t do that. Outsiders don’t have the same restrictions, which is why Mr Blodget has been able to build Business Insider into a popular news site, and raise millions of dollars in VC funding.¨

Read more here.