Forget Blogs

Graham Webster in Editor and Publisher says Forget Blogs

Are blogs the answer to newspapers' disappearing-audience problem? No way, says our young reporter. The right way to capture young readers, he says, is to work on smarter interfaces and new ways of delivering information.

Blogs are both a smarter interface AND a new way of delivering information

Among forward-looking media thinkers, many of them with more experience in journalism that I have on this earth, I have developed an apparently unpopular opinion. The blog craze has prompted dozens of newspapers and other news outlets to produce or plan blogs for their own Web sites. Inevitably, the argument is that it's a good way to reach young readers who rarely buy the print edition. My heresy? Blogs are a horrible way to deliver journalism. Forget them.

They certainly are not a good way to deliver journalism if you don't want people to be able to criticize what you write.

This is not to say that I don't read them. For someone sitting in an office looking for story ideas all day, blogs are great. You can check back with them every hour, and if the folks behind the blog are tireless, something new will have appeared. But you can say the same about many news sites, including E&P Online.

You do't want news outlets to consider blogs, do you also want them to drop their news site?

Are blogs journalism? How could the answer be anything but an emphatic "sometimes!" Blogging is a medium, and some journalists use it to deliver their work.

But the coming generation doesn't use blogs to get their news.

Some do. And others to augment the news they get from other sources.

Some young political junkies (read: political science majors and student journalists) have the time to plow through the likes of Wonkette, Talking Points Memo, and Andrew Sullivan's blog. For most of us, however, we want a page with what print designers would call multiple entry points. We want to see the most important news on one screen, ranked by an editorial filter we trust.

Then use Google News

That's why people between 18 and 34 are 35% more likely to get news at least once a day from a portal site such as Yahoo.com and MSN.com than from newspapers (or their Web sites), despite the fact that newspapers are considered just as trustworthy, according to a newly released Carnegie Corporation study.

Blogs are popular among some readers because they're fast, and bloggers often have a voice and attitude young people can enjoy reading. But blogging is an unfriendly medium. No one wants to have to go through clunky archives to try and find background coverage, and no one really wants to synthesize a bunch of chronological entries into a coherent view of the day's news.

News Sites have clunky archives, and my blog has a search feature.

The real story about blogs that most in journalism don't care about is the radical change in social interactions they promote among a certain portion of young people. This is where I admit that most of the blogs I read offer far from serious discussion. Many of my friends publish blogs; I publish one myself. It's one way for us to keep in touch at a stage in life when people constantly move all over the country and the world. Sometimes these blogs and their content streams will even bloom into very intelligent discussions about issues not addressed in academia. But most blogs my friends and I read are not journalistic material.

Just because your blog is not journalistic material does not mean that others are not.

We don't use blogs because they're a good way to deliver information. We use them because they're cheap and easy, and we're not putting a lot of time into it. The same goes for the journalists who run blogs. If they had the technical expertise and the money to create a more reader-friendly medium, it's no doubt this chronological "Web log" nonsense would end.

Untrue. There are many types of blogs, and I can't think of any of them that are likely to go away just because someone developed a more reader-friendly medium. If such a medium was developed, it might be used for some blogs, but that is not what he is talking about.

Even if personal bloggers and journo-bloggers can't afford to develop something better, newspapers can't afford not to. To attract young readers, newspapers should first lose the fixation on newsprint. The newsrooms that produce newspapers are "news operations" just like any other journalistic outlet. Producing lower-quality newspapers to hand out free in urban areas is exactly the wrong idea. Why would anyone take a paper with 12-hour-old news when their cell phone has seconds-old news on tap? NYU j-school professor Jay Rosen has caught the scent in his recent blog essay "Laying the Newspaper Gently Down to Die."

Next, newspapers should get serious about pioneering methods for online content delivery. Forget about blogs and invest time and money in developing a useful interface that customizes the online experience for every user. Remember also that the home or office PC is not the only way people access the internet. Take advantage of the information devices we all carry with us, and develop usable mobile phone interfaces, maybe even in cooperation with mobile service providers.

Have you ever heard of moblog (a mobile weblog, or moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile or portable device, such as a cellular phone or PDA.)

Finally -- not that I need to remind anyone -- newsrooms cost money to run. Take a cue from cable television, where dozens or hundreds of channels attract very specifically segmented audiences, making them very attractive to individual advertisers. Go a few steps further than the Yahoo-type portals and customize the news mix for the individual reader (giving you a clear picture of who advertisers will reach). Beat the online portals in convenience and relevancy, and you've got a business model.

Rex Hammock blogged Webster's definition of clueless: I'm sure Graham Webster is a nice person and I don't want to suggest he's actually an idiot. But this column certainly is idiocy. The "young reporter" at Editor & Publisher says "blogs are a horrible way to deliver journalism...and forget them." Why is this statement idiocy? The basis for his observation suggests proves he's never used a newsreader, RSS, Topix, PubSub or many other ways that allow one to have dozens of "entry points" into blog posts. Geez.

Don't embarass yourself next time Graham. Ask around, perhaps say, "Am I missing something here?" I assume using RSS tools is not something they teach in J-school yet, Graham. The world is changing, however. Get over it. Also, Graham, for the record, the buzzword "entry point" is SO 2003. But maybe you missed it as you were depending on Yahoo's "portal" page (which is so, what, 1996?). Again, "young reporters" tend to display their limitations when they project their ignorance onto an entire generation. Graham, there are enough old geezers making stupid decisions at newspapers. Don't be a geezer before your time.