Not to say that journalists don't also get their authority from their work too, especially the great ones like Dan! But by and large, authority for journalists comes from their publication and is un-earned while bloggers earn it post by post! (Hint to newspapers and other publications: if you put your archives in a publicly accessible place and had a permalink for every piece of writing for all your journalists, your journalists would enjoy the authority that bloggers do simply by having their entire body of work accessible. Assuming of course that what they wrote is good!).

From Musings from POP! Public Relations: PR Face2Face:
Dan Gillmor, Founder, Grassroots Media Inc..:

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I haven't put this to the test, but I am sure that there is a large number of people at big corporations who would not return my phone calls now.

No journalists should ever, ever forget that the platform is a huge part of their ability to get a phone call returned. It's a mistake to equate one's own abilities with the organization one represents.

I recently sent an email to a PR person at a significant company in the tech industry, asking for an advance look at a product. I never got a response. I doubt that I would have failed to get a response -- even if the answer was "No" -- if I was working at the Merc.

But, at the same time, I have found that some people are more likely to talk to me than they were in the past. It goes both ways.

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