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Blogs to kill traditional media?

Friday | December 10, 2004 | 2:23 pm  

Sev­eral recent things have gotten me think­ing more deeply about blogs.

The first is the announce­ment that Dan Gilmor is leav­ing the Merc to pursue an grass­roots / open-​source jour­nal­ism effort.

The second was an inter­est­ing tidbit from Tom Curley, CEO of the AP:

Deliv­er­ing a keynote speech at the Online News Asso­ci­a­tion con­fer­ence in Hol­ly­wood, he said a change is taking place right now in which broad­band access, Web search, RSS feeds, and weblogs are coming together to “unlock the con­tent from any vessel in which we try to con­tain it.”

Ever since blogs’ mind-​share started rising among the pop­u­lace and the media, I’ve been noodling their affect(s) and place in the media landscape.

Aside from hard-​core tra­di­tion­al­ists, who would say “blogging isn’t journalism,” or “blogs, my doctor said I’ve got a benign one of those,” most are insert­ing blogs into the tra­di­tional media circuit.

Take a look at what Curley says about the new “atomic content.”

Curley acknowl­edged the dif­fi­culty of build­ing a new eco­nomic model for jour­nal­ism built around “atomic content,” but pointed to bright spots in the trans­for­ma­tion, espe­cially the “emergence of an engaged audience” that can be seen form­ing around the news in the con­text of weblogs.

In this case, Curley, and others, are insert­ing the blo­gos­phere in the feed­back por­tion of that diagram.

But, I think that’s just a rehash­ing of the old-​school “we pub­lish, you listen” model of journalism.

The prob­lem is that blogs are more than just a method of feed­back for the tra­di­tional media.

So what is a blog, really? What does it mean to the tra­di­tional media? Tune in again for more, same pun­ditry chan­nel, same pun­ditry time. (Or check my RSS feed for updates.)

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Journalism

Rethinking objectivity: how not to kill traditional media

Thursday | December 9, 2004 | 7:59 pm  

Objec­tiv­ity has to mean more than side a / side b

Get the the Truth, with cap­i­tal T, or as close as we can.

Two faces to news­pa­pers, smaller group of reporters (young ones?) blog all day on their beats. Just the facts ma’am, well and a little bit of personality.

While the paper/non-blog Web site resem­bles more of a news mag­a­zine. We go in-​depth (but on tighter dead­lines than a mag) on the issue of the day/week. Not what did the prez say about the budget deficity, and what did the minor­ity leader say? What does it actu­ally mean. Get some econ­o­mists, get the num­bers, run them yourselves.

Go deep, and leave super­fi­cial­ity to TV.

In the interim, we need to inte­grate with the blo­gos­phere. Ditch paid con­tent, ditch reg­is­tra­tion. Supply RSS/Atom feeds. Open up our sto­ries to commenting.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Drafts

Blogs to kill traditional media, part II

Thursday | December 9, 2004 | 7:54 pm  

Outline

Blogs are really self-​publishing If free­dom of press belongs to those who own…

Now, in all respects, blog­gers are both feed­back providers, audi­ence mem­bers, and publishers.

If they’re pub­lish­ers, then they’re tra­di­tional media’s competition.

There’s more of them, they do this in their spare time (link to ama­teurs taking over industries…), they have much, much lower overhead.

Bye, bye, tra­di­tional media?

Ah, but what about access — only “we” can talk to the stars, the offi­cials, the politicos.

For how long? What if they blog? They release canned press con­fer­ences and press releases via blogs/rss.

It’s scary to think that offi­cials would no longer have to actu­ally answer ques­tions from an adver­sar­ial press.

But even some crit­ics would say we’re not asking the tough questions.

Another crit­i­cism is that we prac­tice he said, she said jour­nal­ism. Side A, Side B, add a lede and a head­line and your done.

That’s a crit­i­cism that prob­a­bly cuts closer to home.

And its a brand of jour­nal­ism that loses value in a blog-ified/RSS-ified world.

After all I can sub­scribe to my lib­eral blog­gers and con­ser­v­a­tive blog­gers and have the side a side b brought to me automatically.

Or worse, I can ignore the side I dis­agree with…

Google can pull news together now in crappy HTML format, imag­ine what they can do with RSS feeds. They’ll bring together auto­mat­i­cally stitched news sto­ries from bloggers.

On the web, con­tent is king, and everywhere.

And “we” make our liv­ings by bundling con­tent, with (often annoy­ing ads).

So what do we do? Can we sur­vive in a world where bundling decreases value?

Tune in again…

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Drafts

Ads, can they be good again?

Thursday | December 9, 2004 | 3:41 pm  

http://​www.​mas​ternew​me​dia.​org/​n​e​w​s​/​2​0​0​4​/​1​1​/​2​3​/​a​d​s​_​i​n​s​i​d​e​_​r​s​s​_​g​o​o​d​s​_​a​d​v​i​c​e.htm

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Drafts