Link Round-Up: Blogs, PR and the Media

I’ve got a bunch of links where these items converge:

• Michael O’Connor Clarke explains
  the role that PR people should have in supervising corporate blogging:
  none. "A blog that is PR-sanitized, scrubbed for messages, spun, or otherwise
  adulterated by over-protective flackery can’t really be called a blog."
  Well said. Thanks, Robert.
• Some foolish PR company pitched
  Dan Gillmor (of all people) on "how companies are taking steps to
  protect their corporate reputations from bloggers/digital influencers."
  I’d be curious to read that article, just to hear their counter-spin strategy.
  Now, admittedly, "managing and monitoring digital influencers" is
  crucially important, and something we’re doing an increasing amount of. Still,
  there’s world of difference between ‘managing’ and ‘protecting’. Tom Murphy
  has some great
  things to say on this topic.
• This is a few days old, but Robert Scoble has a good essay on why companies
  shouldn’t
  be afraid to blog.
• Finally, here are three newspaper articles (registration required on all
  three, I’m afraid) related to journalism, weblogs and politics. William Raspberry
  misses
  the good old days, when journalists controlled the information. Jim Rutenberg
  gets a touch whiny about how his profession is being
  assailed by nutters on the Web. Nat Ives writes as corporate America is
  just
  discovering these things called blogs.