A great summary of the media landscape in a Robert Peston blog/speech

Planning a course on Media Relations it would be hard to find a single source which raises so many issues on role and future of journalism and by implication role and future of media relations as Robert Peston's latest blog entry.  This is a reprint of Robert Peston's speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival sponsored by the Media Guardian and reprinted as a blog.  The speech being a blog is of course significantly enhanced by readers' comments underneath (114 two days later) - for a recent Royal Bank of Scotland blog he ended up with over 700 - and this is of course an increasingly interesting and important aspect of media relations in terms of monitoring and judging how a story and discourse is being received and in its future development. 

I also thought it was particularly noteworthy how important the blog is in the development and disseminaton of his ideas; "For me, the blog is at the core of everything I do, it is the bedrock of my output. The discipline of doing it shapes my thoughts. It disseminates to a wider world the stories and themes that I think matter.....Most important of all, the blog allows me and the BBC to own a big story and create a community of interested people around it. Sharing information - some of it hugely important, some of it less so - with a big and interested audience delivers that ownership and creates that committed community."