How do newspapers benefit from independent blogs? An editor at The Telegraph explains and follows up.

Increasingly people are getting their news from blogs, news aggregators and social bookmarking sites. Rather than ignoring that, newspapers have to embrace it.

Links, of course, work both ways. Boston papers have not integrated blog content into their news and analysis in a meaningful way and seem nervous about promoting independent blogs. In fact, apart from lifestyle coverage, local blogs get very little notice. And even when content from a blog is featured, the papers go out of their way not to provide a URL or even a blog name, so that the reader is cut off from the source material.

Whether that's because of fear, spitefulness or cluelessness doesn't really matter. In the end, smart editors will see the benefit of bi-directional promotion. And in the end, the only editors left will be the smart editors.