I saw this regarding journalist bloggers – my responses are interspersed into the author’s text.
- Blogs bury yesterday and make last week disappear. Like the clocks in The Exorcist, blogs demonstrate reverse chronology in an unsettling way. Today’s entry is on top. Until tomorrow, when yesterday slips away. Wednesday buries Monday and pretty soon the good stuff is down in the basement somewhere. Want context? Just check out our handy tag cloud! Click around and you’ll find it. . .somewhere. Maybe.
This is a function of bad design, not of a bad media choice or writing style. A well designed blog will display relevant content, recent content, and popular content with each story. What’s new isn’t most important. By that same logic, the front and back pages of the newspaper are must important, and we needn’t read anything beyond the lede, no?
- Blogs impose no word limit. Saying “no word limit†to a journalist is like shouting “shrimp at the buffet table.†Stand aside and don’t expect to see that reporter for awhile.
This is true – words are as limitless as bandwidth – essentially free. The reader, however, thinks and acts otherwise and rewards appropriate length content. Much talk occurs over post length, being above the fold scroll, use of bolding, images, and blockquotes, and other narrative enablers. Needless to say, the readership and the market for attention will reward those that get it right and punish those who get it wrong (in terms of traffic and time spent on site).
- Blogs sustain the Cult of Text. Traditional journalists are trained to render complex behaviors and ideas into columns of words. (Most) blogs do little to invite journalists to tell stories in novel ways with new media.
Really? Blogs don’t use audio, video, infographics, and images? Perhaps the author isn’t reading the correct blogs.
- Blogs reinforce the auteur theory. Bloggers often think they are curating a collection of their wisdom, which fans will stop by daily to admire. Fifteen minutes with Omniture illustrates that web users don’t behave this way. Much (if not most) blog traffic comes in through the side door, via links from other blogs or web search results. Blog traffic isn’t about who–it’s about what (and what else).
Again, really? This blog had a readership of one- me. Somehow, in the past few years, it’s hovered around 100 daily feed readers and 150-300 uniques.  It is fair to say that search, hit, and run users come and go, but they people who come back do so for the content, which is aggregated attention (and you could argue wisdom – of a sort).
I know the author is presenting a contrarian viewpoint. Let’s keep things in proper perspective – this is from a source whose tag line is “a skeptic’s guide to emerging web technologies”. The simple fact for newspaper executives is the advertising environment – advertisers are cutting back their spending drastically, with the only static source of revenue or slim gains being online advertising – hence the push for online content.
If a journalist wants to blog, I suggest that they hang their own shingle up and blog a personal interest, and not in a professional capacity. Why would you want to be a star in someone else’s sky? A blogging journalist becomes their own brand to manage, not a property of their employer, which is what the industry would want.
Tags: advertising environment, bad media, online advertising, online content, web search results, web technologies, web users
