Editor’s note (April 2025): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2007, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In early 2007, a PR professional named Chris Clarke sat down and typed out something a lot of people in the industry were quietly thinking. Bloggers were getting hyped. Social media was being sold as the future of communications. And Clarke, working at a Toronto PR firm, wasn’t buying it.
His piece made a clear case: give him the big media hit over the blogosphere, every single time. Journalists had budgets, editors, accountability. Blogs had opinions, link bait, and borrowed stories. It was a reasonable argument — and within a few years, history would make it look almost entirely wrong.
Understanding why that prediction failed tells us something important about how influence actually works, and where PR strategy should sit in 2025.
What Clarke got right — and where the logic broke down
Clarke’s core argument wasn’t unreasonable for 2007. The blogosphere at that point was genuinely messy. Trust in online content was inconsistent. The infrastructure for verifying claims didn’t exist the way it does now. If you were a PR person trying to justify a campaign to a client, pointing to a Times feature felt a lot more defensible than pointing to a niche blog with 3,000 readers.
But the argument had a flaw in its foundation. It assumed that trust and reach were primarily institutional — that credibility flowed downward from editors and mastheads. Here’s what Chris Clarke shared about social media in the original article: “Give me the big news media hits over the blogosphere today, tomorrow, and the day after that. Each have shortcomings, but the shortcomings of the blogosphere today far exceed those of mainstream media today. No matter how many times Dan Rather screws up, I’m betting on his reporting every time over the blogosphere. The news organizations of the world have facts, data, evidence, copy, budgets, salaries, experts, and most importantly, trust. What does the blogosphere have? Opinions, virtual information, link bait, buddy lists, spam, and the freedom to grab stories from mainstream media and make it their own.”
That may be so, but it’s not all they have. Consumer recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising today, according to Forrester Research — and newspapers, magazines, and other mainstream media sit well down that list. The assumption that institutional authority equals audience trust turned out to be fragile. And fragile assumptions make for fragile strategy.
The trust shift that changed everything
The years following Clarke’s piece didn’t just validate bloggers — they fundamentally restructured how trust works in media. The Edelman Trust Barometer, which has tracked institutional trust globally since 2001, has documented a sustained decline in trust toward traditional media across most Western markets. By the mid-2010s, “a person like me” — meaning a peer, a fellow consumer, someone without an obvious institutional agenda — had become one of the most credible sources of information in any category.
This wasn’t just a cultural mood shift. It was a structural change in how audiences made decisions. People started filtering information through their networks rather than through mastheads. A food blogger with 50,000 loyal readers who’d followed her for years became, for her audience, more credible on restaurant recommendations than a national newspaper’s dining section. The intimacy and specificity that Clarke dismissed as niche turned out to be exactly what readers were hungry for.
PR strategy had to catch up. Slowly, then all at once, earned media playbooks started expanding beyond the traditional press list. Influencer relations, creator partnerships, blogger outreach programs — these weren’t replacing media relations so much as filling in the gaps that mass media had always left open.
The creator economy as PR infrastructure
By 2025, the landscape Clarke was writing about is almost unrecognisable. The “blogosphere” has evolved into a sprawling creator economy spanning newsletters, YouTube channels, podcasts, TikTok accounts, and long-form Substack publications. And that ecosystem has become, for many brands, the primary channel through which genuine audience relationships are built.
Research from Influencer Marketing Hub consistently shows that influencer marketing delivers strong returns precisely because it operates through existing trust relationships — the creator has already done the work of earning the audience’s confidence. That’s not something you can manufacture with a press release, no matter how well-crafted.
What’s changed isn’t that bloggers became journalists. It’s that the distinction between “institutional credibility” and “earned trust” collapsed in ways that made the original binary — mainstream media vs. blogosphere — feel obsolete. Some of the most trusted voices in finance, health, technology, and culture today publish independently, outside any traditional masthead.
What PR people should take from this
Clarke’s skepticism in 2007 wasn’t irrational — it was just tethered to a model of influence that was already shifting beneath his feet. The lesson isn’t that he was wrong to ask hard questions. Skepticism about hype cycles is healthy. The lesson is that the questions were too narrow.
The right question was never “blogosphere or mainstream media?” It was: where does genuine trust actually live for the audience my client is trying to reach? Sometimes that’s a national newspaper. Sometimes it’s a mid-sized newsletter with an intensely loyal subscriber base. Often, it’s both — layered together in ways that reinforce each other.
Modern PR strategy works best when it stops treating reach and trust as synonymous, and starts mapping where credibility actually resides for a specific audience. That mapping looks different for every campaign, every client, every category.
Clarke’s train metaphor — waiting on a platform, not sure if anything was coming — turned out to be more accurate than he intended. The train did come. It just didn’t run on the tracks he was watching.
The takeaway for content professionals
For bloggers and content creators reading this in 2025, Clarke’s 2007 piece is useful not as a cautionary tale about being wrong, but as a reminder of how quickly the foundations of a media landscape can shift.
The credibility that traditional outlets spent decades building eroded faster than most insiders thought possible. The trust that independent creators built — slowly, post by post, through consistency and specificity — turned out to be more durable than anyone predicted. That’s not an argument for complacency. It’s an argument for doing the work that builds genuine audience relationships, because those relationships are, in the long run, the only thing that holds.
