Whither newspaper blogs?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 23 October 2006 at 16:18
Tags: Blogs, Journalism

Andrew Grant-Adamson is rightly puzzled by the proliferation of blogs on newspapers’ web sites. Apparently bored during yesterday’s grey weather, he counted 40 blogs at Times, 32 at the Telegraph, 12 at Guardian, 10 at the Sun, five at the Mail. The Mirror and Indy, it seems, aren’t blogging.

Grant-Adamson (along with Roy Greenslade) would like to know how many people are actually reading all of these blogs. With a few exceptions, the answer is probably “not many”. But as long as editors are satisfied that there are not better ways to deploy their bloggers’ time to generate web traffic, that’s not necessarily a problem. Puny audiences have never stopped a blogger before.
A more important issue is the content of some newspaper blogs:

Some of the offerings are very good but too many seem like ways of presenting traditional content in a “look we understand the digital age” way, while others are dumping grounds for copy that would never get into the paper.

Indeed, several papers seem guilty of “jumping on the blogwagon” — rushing into blogging not for any journalistic reason, but because it seems to be a hip buzzword. As blogger Justin “Chicken Yoghurt” McKeating noted a few months ago, most newspaper have simply used blogs to publish short, second-rate columns in reverse-chronological order, mimicking the form but not the spirit of the genre.

This is a debate that has been raging for years. One touchpoint for it was Bob Cauthorn’s post on Rebuilding Media last summer entitled “Note to mainstream media: You don’t get to blog”.

Professional journalists can never be proper bloggers, Cauthorn argued, because “in the pure sense a big part of blogging involves the voices of people who don’t have a publishing/broadcasting aparatus at their disposal and don’t have the institutional restraints of a media company.”

Cauthorn’s post is way over the top, but it (and its comments) should be required reading for any newspaper thinking about unleashing their reporters or columnists on a “blog”.

Newspapers do get to blog if they use blogging tools to read as well as write — in other words, if they chose to participate, as equals, in the conversation among other bloggers. They get to blog if they allow their blogging journalists to develop a distinctive voice.   They get to blog if they use them to aggregate useful content on other sites — Greenslade’s Guardian media blog is a good example of the latter, as is Daniel Finkelstein’s new Comment Central blog at the Times.

And they do get to blog if they use the flexibility of a simple content managment system to experiment and innovate quickly.

Tags: Blogs, Journalism