• USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, Wednesday, March 29, 2006 10:47 AM

Given newspapers' urgency to adapt fresh reader-grabbing strategies, and in view of the blogosphere's explosive growth, Dave Panos, CEO of a company called Pluck, seems to have stumbled across a "duh" idea. Pluck, just launching, syndicates blog material to newspapers.  This has been done before, of course, but never on so broad a scale.  And there is a difference between Pluck and those outfits that have tried to syndicate blogs in the past. First of all, the company will not confine content to political topics. Everything from food to technology to sports will be in the mix and available to client papers. "I like to call it the AP newswire for blogs," says Panos, the CEO of Pluck, whose product, called BlogBurst, debuted just weeks ago on the West Coast.  Several large newspapers, including The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Houston Chronicle, have signed up as "lighthouse partners" in the network.  Syndicated blogs will begin appearing on those papers' sites in the next few weeks, reports Annenberg's Web site. Right now, says Annenberg, BlogBurst is operating on an experimental basis, but it seems to have merit: "'You have a lot of great bloggers out there, and a lot of time they blog about a subject you may not be as strong on on your own site,' said Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, adding that the paper was interested in supplementing sections like food and travel. 'We just thought we'd get on the front lines and see if it's something that would work long term for us.'"

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