This week saw the start in the Montreal Gazette of a blog from one of its journalists. That’s the Andy Riga E-file. It covers the local municipal elections. It’s an interesting development given the initial antagonism between journalists and bloggers.

The two groups in the main are very different. Journalists are professionals who attempt to fully validate their stories. Such stories are then published, in the old days in a printed newspaper and now quite often on-line. There are a limited number of journalists. Bloggers on the other hand are around in huge numbers. They can publish whatever they choose whenever they choose to do it. The blogging software is so user-friendly that it encourages many people to comment on what they see around them.

So there was the conflict: the limited number of quality items from journalists versus the illimited entries of unknown quality from a host of bloggers. The bloggers had the advantage of numbers and immediacy. It’s hardly surprising that the journalists had a problem of competing in this unequal struggle.

Business Week was one of the first media vehicles to put out a series of blogs: for example BlogSpotting covers the blogosphere, or the ongoing world of blogs. Now we have Andy Riga joining in this movement with his E-file. It’s an inevitable trend.

The prime reason for this is the parallel world of the RSS newsfeeds that most blogs support. This allows any blog that has a new entry to alert all the news aggregators that there’s a new item. This is done by sending them a ‘ping’ to indicate that a new news item has been created. So very quickly the whole world can be aware of a new blog entry. This power has now been multiplied enormously by Google unveiling its BlogSearch, which can search through all blogs for particular topics. It is turning out to be extremely powerful in giving a rapid indication of what’s new. This week Yahoo! will unveil its own blog search too.

So way to go, Andy Riga, of the Montreal Gazette. You’re on the leading edge.

Related posts:

1. For political junkies only
2. Video Bloggers in Montreal?
3. The Blue Metropolis Festival still doesn’t think blogging is writing
4. Montreal Business Bloggers Get-Together
5. Google Blog Search