This seems like a really interesting result of sitting on an industry and cranking out solid content over time. I like that it has the "gossip" and moves of the insiders.
The interesting but not surprising result is that when all hell breaks loose ..you become "the media" in that space. I am not sure what the return on investment is but given that the blogger has been at since 2006 you have to figure that at most it might have cost 200-400K in technology,staff overhead and promotion to get into position to influence the debate in a strike that costs $21million a day.
Any place that you have a disruption every 3-5 years and the disruptions costs millions per day are probably great spaces to fund and subsidize a blog to dominate the space. The ROI is just to good to ignore.
Link: Industry blog making an impact on WGA strike | Planting Liberally.
The NYT reports today that Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily blog is having a huge impact on the WGA strike. This reminds me of a post I wrote back in April, arguing that progressives should create a network of industry blogs in order to sway "public opinion" within a given industry. At the time, I wrote that such blogs could help sway industry insiders on internal debates which have political overtones, like the open source vs. proprietary debate within the computer software industry. I also wrote about the need to start progressive workplace blogs, and even suggested that unions could start a fleet of such blogs as a way to identify workplaces where they might find a lot of support. (I since incorporated that idea into a series on using the internet to strengthen labor unions.)
Well, the upshot is that these posts turned out to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. Industry insiders and workers are already creating industry and workplace blogs, and those blogs are already having an impact on labor disputes and internal industry debates. Welcome to 2003. Now, it's time for the progressive movement and labor movement to wise up to these online developments and begin harnessing them for progressive cultural change within the workforce.
