Grass-roots Journalism Meets the Modern News Weekly
Joel Martinsen of Danwei reports on Blog Weekly, a new magazine whose sources are entirely web-based.
Blog Weekly is not the first print publication to recognize the value of web content, but it might be the first legitimate effort. Earlier attempts to print the Internet, such as Net News Weekly or Blogs, employed the dodgy strategy of taking an existing magazine licensed for an underperforming market, dressing it in a web-related motif, and filling it with downloaded material.
Many traditional media outlets supplement their own content with the odd blog post, and Vista (看天下), a Beijing-based magazine which, like Blog Weekly, is sponsored by the Ningxia Daily Group, uses Internet commentary to spice up its digest of the country’s major newspapers and magazines. But the new magazine is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the wealth of content available online: according to a magazine employee, it currently is the only publication authorized by GAPP to draw its content exclusively from blogs.
