I’m quoted in The Press Gazette. Fame, fame at last!

He says many stories first reported on blogs, including some of his own, later make it into the mainstream press.

Much
like the mainstream media, bloggers don’t always get it right. The
recent sale of the British company Peninsular & Oriental (P&O)
to the United Arab Emirates-owned Dubai Ports World (DPW) caused great
controversy in the USA. It raised concerns over the perceived security
risks of having an Arab-owned company controlling US ports. Many
prominent US bloggers repeated what senators and the mainstream media
were saying, calling for the government to intervene.

All apart from one man – Kenton E Kelly, who blogs under the name Dennis the Peasant. Kelly did what the journalists and bloggers didn’t do and went in search of facts.

“He
was just about the only person who went digging into what was actually
going on,” explains Worstall. “People like popular blogger Michelle
Malkin and Senators Schumer and Clinton were screaming about ‘the
selling of American ports and national security’. Dennis was the only
person who went and read what P&O actually does — it operates some
leases within the ports and has almost nothing to do with security at
all.”

The story spread from the blog to Reason magazine
, and the magazine paid Kelly to write the story. The best of old media
are looking at ways of incorporating the best of citizen journalism
into their brands. Worstall thinks sifting through the vast blogophony
of voices to find the genuine nuggets of excellence is the main
difficulty facing newspapers that might otherwise be open to using blog
content.

“Success will go to the editorial team that can mix and
match the best of both. For, as should be obvious, the 500,000 UK
bloggers know more, in detail, on any and every subject under the sun
than the staff of any individual newspaper,” he says.

“How to pick out of the rabble that one voice that has the truth on any specific subject will be
the difficulty.”

A problem which our new and upcoming site will hope to address. Once we’ve worked out how to use Scoop.