Industry trade media have traditionally been an important source of information on what's new and issues both for the trade and for consumer journalists to consider.
Now, trade media have another rival: blogs. In a recent survey by Arketi Group, a high-tech B2B marketing and PR firm, they found that 84% of the journalists say they would use or have already used blogs as primary or secondary sources for articles. Plus, 54% use blogs to get story ideas and, in another interesting statistic, and of those surveyed, 24% have their own blog. (Most likely the media surveyed are in the high-tech field, so their blog usage figures would skew higher than that of travel or lifestyle media). That being said, it's a wakeup call for more PR professionals to get involved in the blogosphere. At the same time, traditionalists will be happy to hear that the same survey found that the majority of journalists get their ideas from news releases (90%), industry sources (90%), PR contacts (89%) and newswires (79%).
