Bits
Business, Innovation, Technology, Society… put them all together and you get Bits, the new New York Times tech blog. Rather like the rationale behind it: "We sell more than 1 million newspapers a day and have more than 14 million visitors a month to our Web site. So why would The New York Times need a blog to cover technology? The answer is that blogs give us even more tools to pursue our passion: helping people understand what's new and interesting in technology."
The NYT also acknowledges that something like Bits is evidence of the fragmentation of traditional media: "Today people are flitting between mobisodes on their cellphones and blog posts they find on Digg. But after the media go through the cyclotron, there are still particles of entertainment and information that experiences are made of. We offer our news and analysis, then, in the form of Bits."
The paper of record is throwing a lot of its resources at Bits and if it gets the mo it could threaten the viability of niche tech bloggers such as Om, Rafat and Michael. But these boys are native to the blog medium, they're fast and their loyal audiences are not going to desert them now for anything that's tainted with ink stains.
