The long struggle of the bloggers to establish blogging as not only an authentic source of information but establishing it in parlance of other front line media seems to be paying now.



At present, we have a number of instances about the journalists who are raising money through turning their independent blogs into proper businesses. In the most recent example, Rafat Ali, a 31 year old editor and publisher of PaidContent.org with two other new and analysis web sites has raised money from the veteran venture capitalist Alan Patricof to expand his Web publishing business.



Rafat Ali had started his website PaidContent.org around four years back when he failed to find work after writing for two publications Inside.com and Silicon Alley Reporter. His website concentrated on how the Internet and other technologies are affecting the media business, which raised great public interest in the website.



Rafat Ali says PaidContent.org is the flagship website and claims that including two other sites, MocoNews.net and Contentsutra, the sites are being visited five million times by the visitors every month. These web sites focus on the mobile and Indian on-line media market.



Another example in this genre is of Om Malik who is a contributing writer for Business 2.0, and is all set to leave his full time job of the magazine to devote his time for his GigaOmniMedia Inc. as he has recently raised close to $1 million for his company. Om Malik focuses on the broadband market through GigaOm.com, which he started six years back to details of his reporting for the Red Herring magazine.



An expert investigative business reporter of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Christopher Carey, has left his job to start Sharesleuth.com LLC, which will focus on to dig out cases of fraud and other transgressions from corporate filing with securities regulators. He is said to have raised an undisclosed amount for this venture from Mark Cuban who is the owner the famous Dallas Mavericks basketball team with several other companies.



To sum it up, it would be pertinent to quote Wall Street Journal, which writes,

the financing, though small in comparison with most Web deals, is one of several in recent weeks that indicate optimism on the part of early-stage investors in the viability of blogs as an outlet for journalism, rather than the gossip and personal opinion that characterizes much of the medium.