I was intrigued by Tim Dyson's recent post on "Blogs vs News". And inspired by his findings, and a recent post by Josh (which is a good reminder to us all),  I conducted a similar (albeit cursory) experiment around the Garth Turner hullabaloo here in Canada - essentially, trying to identify which mainstream media articles received the most attention (ie. links) from bloggers.

What I like about this approach - and which we need to be doing more of than we are now - is that it offers a new dimension to how we as PR professionals can further measure the impact and influence of our traditional media relations activities. In this instance, it highlights an important linkage between a specific media relations activity and the reaction it incites.

It was also interesting to see which media articles ended up feeding through the blogosphere - and the outlets that people relied upon to provide context to their postings.

For example:

• 3 bloggers linked to this Globe & Mail article.
• 19 bloggers linked to this Globe article.
• 31 bloggers linked to this CBC article.
• 8 bloggers linked to this CTV article.
• 1 blogger linked to this Winnipeg Sun article.
• 3 bloggers linked to this Tyee.ca article.

(It should be noted that some of these "blogs" are spam blogs - but I was too lazy to vet the results in any great depth)

Although it doesn't appear that Tim, in his post, connects the blog mentions to actual media hits, the 10:1 ratio of blog mentions to media as highlighted in my cursory example (in addition to the 413 blog posts referencing Garth Turner and blogs) unequivocally reinforces the importance of traditional media relations in addition to targeting (and tracking) non-traditional channels such as blogs - and then analyzing the linkages between the two.