President Bush has signed the "Openess Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007" which, among other things, makes it clear that bloggers, podcasters and other New Media professionals are now considered on equal footing with other journalists under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
This is interesting from a legal perspective, but I think corporate bloggers should have already been thinking this way.
First, if you are creating content, you need to be considering your audience, its needs and interests, just like anyone else who writes for a living. Secondly, as people continue to turn away from traditional trade media and going online for news and information about their industries, companies have an opportunity to provide balanced information to their prospects and customers, becoming, in effect, trade publishers themselves.
It's good that the government recognizes "citizen journalists" as equal under the law. But it would be better if companies established communication teams internally that thought and acted like journalists in order to add value to their target publics.
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