Mark Glasser in Online Journalism Review weighs in on a positive trend regarding blogs:

The Wall Street Journal Online is promoting one story per day outside its subscription wall to bloggers. NYTimes.com is boosting the number of RSS feeds it offers. Media companies are starting to work with - instead of against -the blogosphere.

So, from legal debate about deep-linking to linky-love?

What made the Journal trade in its legal threats for free content for bloggers? Bill Grueskin, managing editor of WSJ.com, is a fan of the blogosphere and "gets it," in the words of blogger Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net. When the Journal started opening up for bloggers in May, Jarvis wrote, "This is good for bloggers and good for business. And it's smart of the Journal to care about reaching out to this audience."

But it seems not all is about love and kindness.

Grueskin says traffic generated from blogs to the free features has been "substantial" for compelling stories. While he couldn't be specific about numbers, Grueskin said the links from blogs sometimes rivaled the traffic generated by links in Yahoo Finance.

And the eternal (or so it seems) 'battle' between bloggers and journalists. Tom Biro, sees a shift in the marketing communications landscape

I can't tell if journalists are really 'warming up' to bloggers, but they seem to have a realization that bloggers are super helpful in bringing readers to their work. Twice in a week I had authors submit their own articles through my 'Got a story idea?' link at the top of the pages. This, of course, leads to interesting e-mail discussions back and forth about the article, leading finally to a post in some cases. I have one that I'm working on right now, from an author at PRWeek.

So we come back to one of the main uses for a blog - medium. If PR is the art of getting and managing a company’s message across the media by proxy, then blogging is using your own medium for the message.

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