Editor’s note (April 2025): This article is part of the Blog Herald’s editorial archives. Originally published in 2007, it has been revised and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In early 2007, a PR professional named Chris Clarke sat down and wrote something that many people in the industry were quietly thinking. Bloggers were amazed. Social media was being sold as the future of communication. Clarke, who works at a PR firm in Toronto, wasn’t buying it.
His piece made a clear case: give him a big media hit in the blogosphere every time. Journalists had a budget, editors, accountability. Blogs contained opinions, link fodder and borrowed stories. It was a reasonable argument – and within a few years history would prove it almost completely wrong.
Understanding why this prediction failed tells us something important about how influence actually works and where PR strategy should be in 2025.
Where Clark gets it right and where logic breaks down
Clark’s main argument was not without merit for 2007. The blogosphere was really messed up at the time. Trust in online content was inconsistent. The infrastructure to verify claims was not there as it is today. If you were a PR person trying to pitch a campaign to a client, pointing to a Times feature would be more defensible than pointing to a niche blog with 3,000 readers.
But there was a flaw in the foundation of the argument. He assumed that trust and coverage were primarily institutional—that trust flowed down from editors and mastheads. Here’s what Chris Clarke has to say about social media original article: “Give me the big news media hits in the blogosphere today, tomorrow, and the day after. Each one has its flaws, but the flaws of the blogosphere today far outweigh the flaws of the mainstream media today. Dan Rather, no matter how confused he is, I’ll bet on his blogosphere reporting every time. News organizations around the world have facts, information, copy, experts, facts, information, the most important facts, information and experts. Blogosphere reviews, virtual information, contact There is freedom to pick up feed, friend lists, spam, and stories from mainstream media.
This may be so, but that is not all of them. According to Forrester Research, consumer referrals are the most trusted form of advertising today, and newspapers, magazines and other mainstream media are on that list. The assumption that institutional power equals audience trust has become fragile. And fragile assumptions make fragile strategy.
A change of belief that changes everything
The years since Clark’s article haven’t just validated bloggers—they’ve fundamentally restructured how trust works in the media. Edelman Confidence Barometerwhich has been tracking institutional trust globally since 2001, has documented a steady decline in trust in traditional media in most Western markets. By the mid-2010s, “a person like me”—meaning a peer, a peer consumer, someone without an obvious institutional agenda—had become one of the most reliable sources of information in any category.
It wasn’t just a cultural shift. It was a structural change in the way audiences made decisions. People began to filter information through their networks rather than through mastheads. A food blogger with 50,000 loyal readers who have followed him for years has become more reliable for his audience in restaurant recommendations than the food section of a national newspaper. The intimacy and specificity that Clark dismissed as niche became exactly what readers were hungry for.
The PR strategy had to catch up. Slowly, then suddenly, earned media books began to move beyond traditional press listings. Influencer relationships, creative partnerships, blogger outreach programs — these didn’t replace media relationships, so much as they filled the gaps that media always left open.
Creative economy as PR infrastructure
By 2025, the landscape Clark wrote about becomes almost unrecognizable. The “blogosphere” has evolved into a sprawling creative economy that includes newsletters, YouTube channels, podcasts, TikTok accounts, and long-form Substack publications. And this ecosystem has become the main channel through which real audience connections are made for many brands.
research from Influencer Marketing Hub consistently shows that influencer marketing yields strong returns because it operates through existing relationships of trust—the creator has already done the work to earn the audience’s trust. It’s not something you can produce with a press release, no matter how well-crafted it is.
What has changed is not that bloggers are journalists. It is the distinction between “institutional credibility” and “earned trust” that has collapsed in such a way that the original binary—the mainstream media and the blogosphere—feels obsolete. Some of the most trusted voices in finance, healthcare, technology and culture today publish independently outside of any traditional masthead.
What should PR people take from this?
In 2007, Clarke’s skepticism wasn’t irrational—it was simply due to a pattern of influence that was already shifting at his feet. The lesson is not that he was wrong to ask difficult questions. Skepticism about hype cycles is healthy. The lesson is that the questions were too narrow.
The real question is never “the blogosphere or the mainstream media?” It was: where does the real credibility reside for the audience my client is trying to reach? Sometimes it’s a national newspaper. Sometimes it’s a medium-sized newsletter with a very loyal subscriber base. Often, both are intertwined in mutually reinforcing ways.
A modern PR strategy works best when it stops treating reach and credibility as synonymous and begins to map out where credibility actually lies for a specific audience. This mapping looks different for every campaign, every customer, every category.
Clarke’s train metaphor—waiting on the platform, unsure if something is coming—turns out to be more accurate than he intended. The train arrived. He didn’t just run on the tracks he followed.
A package for content professionals
For bloggers and content creators reading this in 2025, Clarke’s 2007 article is useful not as a cautionary tale about getting it wrong, but as a reminder of how quickly the fundamentals of the media landscape can change.
The credibility that traditional outlets spent decades building has eroded faster than most insiders thought possible. The trust that independent creators have built—slowly, mail by mail, through consistency and specificity—has been more durable than anyone could have imagined. This is not an argument for complacency. This is an argument for doing work that builds real audience relationships, because those relationships are the only thing that keep them going in the long run.
