More growth in the blogosphere

Today's news that Betsy Morgan, the GM of CBS.com, is leaving to become chief executive of the Huffington Post, points to the steadily growing influence of the blogosphere.

From Bill Carter's report in the New York Times:

“Getting somebody like this to come to our site says a boatload about where the industry is going,” said Kenneth Lerer, who has been acting as the chief executive of The Huffington Post and will move up to chairman. He founded the site along with Arianna Huffington, the political commentator.

Closer to home, we're seeing how top political sites, like RI Future and Anchor Rising, are taking steps to become more democratic and inclusive. Here's a bit from an item today at AR:

Engaged Citizen is our solution to these and other needs, desires, and problems. Our newest contributor is you. Rather, it could be you if you take the initiative. If you engage.

As with everything we do, we're aware that the feature will develop of its own accord, so our rules for submissions will be very limited, at first. Each regular Anchor Rising contributor (with tenure of at least three months) has the capability of posting under the Engaged Citizen byline. When in doubt, email me. All entries must be published under your actual name, and your identity must be reasonably verifiable. All publication (and unpublication) is at our discretion, but all rights remain with you.

Meanwhile, even if the ProJo sometimes fails to give bloggers credit where credit is due, big media is making interesting use of the blogosphere. A prime example is this past Sunday's New York Times's op-ed section, where the paper printed a series of excerpts from Iranian bloggers about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial visit to Columbia University.