Andrew Revkin’s blog Dot Earth is a model for how journalists can use the blog format in reporting. Now Revkin leaves the New York Times with some well chosen words of advice:
I’lll keep blogging, of course. Frankly, I consider it an unavoidable responsibility of communicators. It has not been easy to blog, particularly while synchronizing that effort with ongoing print work. Through moderating tens of thousands of comments, I’lve had to deal with some angry people not interested in learning, but far more individuals with a thirst for community and understanding and a willingness to encounter contrary views as part of that quest. In many ways, this kind of two-way communication is well suited to the implicit complexities and uncertainty attending life on a crowding planet that is showing signs of strain from the blazingly fast expansion of this human experiment.
Starting with Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh, guardian.co.uk is planning to launch a local news project in a small number of locations. At the moment guardian.co.uk is looking for bloggers – with journalistic qualifications “desirable” – to help cover community news, and report on local developments. The project will emphasise local political decision-making, and is scheduled to go live next year.
Working from your home, or anywhere with WiFi, as a ‘beatblogger’ you will lead the Guardian’s innovative approach to community news coverage in Leeds. This will include reporting on local meetings and events with an emphasis on local political decision making, identifying issues of importance to local residents and signposting information and news provided via other sources. You will be willing to collaborate with others to create a vital resource for the city.
Strange: Everywhere I look there are stories, interviews and analyses about the future of journalism, crisis in the media etc, but I’m not getting fed up with it! A selection of the latest:
Nichepapers are the future of news because their economics are superior. All the Nichepapers above are “real” enterprises, with staff, offices, and fixed and variable costs. Nichepapers offer more bang for the buck: greater benefits for far less cost. Readers get more, better, and faster content – while publishers realize lower capital intensity, lower distribution, marketing, and production costs, and less risk. What is different about them is that they are finding new paths to growth, and rediscovering the lost art of profitability by awesomeness.
Afterthought: Are their economics really superior? How good are their numbers? What about examples from other countries?
Lisa Goldman doesn’t write often enough on her blog, but when she does, it is always worth reading: Wartime tales from Gaza and Israel. I have problems thinking of someone who grasps the “reported blog” genre better than she does.
Foreign Policy magazine is out with a relaunched website with a selection of new blogs, one of them by Dan Drezner (see Undercurrent interview). According to the Passport blog, the objective is to create “a vibrant, daily online magazine of global politics, economics, and ideas.” What’s interesting here is where Foreign Policy is coming from. A very slow bi-monthly print magazine now has a website that is updated many times a day with instant analysis. The web has made such expansion possible for serious print magazines (The Atlantic is another example). Maybe the print versions of these long-form, analytical magazines aren’t as exposed to web migration as daily newspapers. Their “content” lasts longer. Could this print-web combination be a winning media format?
The New York Times website has been blocked by Chinese censors. China-based writer and blogger Adam Minter argues that the impact for web users in China is smaller than it would have been a few years ago. The reason is the proliferation of reported blogs — that is, blogs where the emphasis is on checking and reporting facts rather than expressing opinions:
I don’t mean to suggest that the block isn’t important. But it is interesting (to me, at least) that it is so much less consequential to consumers of English-language news in China, in 2008, than it would have been even two years ago (admittedly, a small group of people, even including the Chinese readers of English). If I had the competence to read and understand the Chinese language blogs that break news, I’d guess that it would matter even less.
(Story found on James Fallows’ blog. Fallows had the story about the NYT block first — on his blog).
YouTube declined to comment on how much money partners earned on average, partly because advertiser demand varies for different kinds of videos. But a spokesman, Aaron Zamost, said “hundreds of YouTube partners are making thousands of dollars a month.” At least a few are making a full-time living: Mr. Buckley said he was earning over $100,000 from YouTube advertisements.
He gets £12-15,000 per year from advertising, but, Dale adds, a lot of his income is on the back of the blog, if not directly related. The work he does for Sky and the Telegraph, for example.
Signs are many that news sites are finally discovering that they should and must link to outside sources — as reported in the NYT. Some interesting news here: “The New York Times will soon offer its online readers an alternative home page with links to competitors.”
Kristine Løwe revisits the editors’ blog that she organized for the Norwegian Editors Associations conference a year ago. That was fun and an interesting experience. But as she says, that blog was quickly abandoned and forgotten. Today I found myself at this year’s editors conference, and no one mentioned that blog. But in a session where the editors should come up with ideas on how to increase their openness, editor-blogging was brought up once more. Terje Angelshaug, reader ombudsman at Bergens Tidende and the only one in Norway with this job, proposed blogging or a regular webpage where editors meet readers and explain editorial choices and policy. After group discussions, there were differing views on this idea. One group’s conclusion was that with the busy schedule of chief editors there’s just not enough time to blog regularly. And they also feared that such a blog would be boring (a quite astonishing remark from people who are supposed to be responsible for producing engaging journalism, in my opinion!). But another group was more positive; here an editors’ blog or a perpetual chat session with readers was recommended. Well, we’ll see, then. For the time being, Pål Hivand’s toon comment says it all. The blog was finished last year, right??
UPDATE May 8. There’s a discussion about this topic on Eirik Newth’s blog (in Norwegian).
This is why I’ve always been skeptical to the idea of blogging for a living:
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
The health risk is not the only reason, though. Paid blogging as it is portrayed in the New York Times story, sounds to me more like round-the-clock news agency reporting or the assembly-line-style breaking news production at news websites. Blogging as it should be is — for me — something else completely: taking new ideas and thoughts for a test-drive, experimenting with writing in a loose and unpretentious and informal way that is impossible in a paid environment, even taking days off from blogging if I don’t feel that I have anything to say there and then. Actually, it’s a way of escaping from tedious work, so it’s really ironic if people substitute the assembly line for the sweatshop!
24/7 blogging about something you’re very interested in can be fun for a while, as several sources note in the NYT story, but then you have to earn your living in another way — and return to “free” blogging.
For a scholarly journal, the recently published volume of First Monday has some really superb titles. Who can resist headlines such as “Loser generated content” or “Interactivity is evil”?
The saga of Bild-Zeitung vs. Bildblog has a new chapter. The huge newspaper wants the German press council (Presserat) to stop accepting complaints from the small, but famous watchblog. The workload those complaints (12 to date) place on the organization is just too large, and besides, the Bildbloggers just do this to generate fuzz which generates ad revenue for themselves. The Bildbloggers answer, while we just shake our heads in disbelief. What a mountain of arrogance a big newspaper can amass over the years.
“Maybe it’ls time for a “slow blog” movement,” suggests Andrew C. Revkin in a post on the (excellent!) New York Times blog Dot Earth. Revkin has a very good point. Again and again we can observe this reflex-like reaction to statements and soundbites that are often already taken out of their context, such as the Bill Clinton quote Revkin refers to. No, it doesn’t seem like many people take the trouble to read transcripts to see for themselves what was actually said. But how much has this to do with blogging specifically? You could argue that politicians, pressure groups and what have you jump on such opportunities very willingly, and are in turn quoted by the media. The bloggers can of course join in and amplify the effect. On the other hand, the web has also made the opposite effect possible, the long tail, if you will. After a while, corrections and new interpretations can get “play” and be noticed, in the way that I noticed Revkin’s post and thought about it. Oh, and since the post is a few days old, this response must be proof that slow blogging is possible!
Borrowed the headline from Sarah Boxer. OMG (or Ã…MG), I think it could be an advantage not to have English as a first language when blogging in English. Just have to exploit it more instead of writing like we learned in school. I wonder how the blog language of Norwegian-Americans on the prairie sounds. Lots of ja, ja, ja, like in “Fargo”?
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko is claiming victory in Sunday’ls national elections (in Ukraine) and the Orange Revolution blah blah blah oh my god she is still smoking hot.
No, but they have a role to play. There is a real danger now that the outside pressure on the generals will drop. A lack of new developments and the regime’s attempts to impose a news blackout will make it harder for the media to keep up the intensity of the coverage. That’s why I support the International Bloggers’ Day for Burma on Thursday October 4. By altering the visual impression of the web through as many participating blogs as possible, this campaign can help refocus the public’s attention. A selection of excellent graphics have been made available, or you can pick from the Flickr group or produce your own.
The Economist has definitely left the laid-back mindset behind. Not content with opening their online archives and making the whole print edition available online, here’s another aggressive step to build traffic: Feeding bloggers stories from the upcoming print edition before publication. The top 100 US political bloggers, that is (hm, do we even have 100 political bloggers in Norway?). Placing stories in other media is something publications have been doing for ages. That bloggers now get the “honour” is an example of how important they are seen as producers of buzz and attention for the traditional media (via Medievärlden).
I like the simplicity of this initiative: mobilize as many bloggers as possible to write about the same topic on the same day. The environment is the chosen issue, and the organizers do not try to push a specific environmental agenda. Thus they avoid the controversy that would come with an activist approach, but might instead achieve more in terms of attention and awareness. Is this one of the ways to organize a global public sphere? Good luck!
Citizen journalism in Germany: Peter Schink reports from a German journalism seminar session on myheimat.de, a citizen journalism concept out of Southern Germany. An editorial team of 15 picks stories from 4500 contributors for printed freesheets which reach a combined circulation of 120.000!
Video virus: Viral Video Chart is a way to browse all those videos that spread faster than you can say H5N1. Currently based on tracking of videos from YouTube, MSN and Google Video.
The columnist game: James Fallows on a critique of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat by economist Edward Leamer (thanks, I didn’t know about that one). Friedman explained to Fallows how a successful columnist works (in Fallows’ words): “In the columnist game, you don’t sell things 51-49. You decide what you think is right, and you push that all the way. So, he could have more accurately said that the world is “flattening,” but that wouldn’t have had the ooomph.” That 51-49 formula probably works just as well for blogging, but what do you do if your motivation is to question and probe? (i.e, if your formula is, say 60-40?)
Shrimponomics and “carbon” banks: Passport at Foreign Policy magazine is one of those few indispensable blogs. A couple of recent posts: On shrimponomics where we are told that shrimp farming is one of the reasons mangrove forests are dying. And on Morgan Stanley’s carbon bank, a partnership with Norwegian Veritas.
The ongoing discussion about Murdoch turning WSJ.com into a free site and the rumours about the NYT dropping Times Select and making all their material freely available — it’s so familiar. The media business worldwide has been discussing the question of free/ad-based vs. paid/subscription on the web for at least 12 years. But it keeps coming back at us, and the free model wins — almost every time. I think this is because audiences are still growing online and web publishing is becoming more and more dynamic. More and more people are using the web actively, and this keeps driving innovation and new possibilities for those media companies who understand the power of free.
It’s so clear when you read Jarvis’ analysis. What sounds more like a winning strategy — trudging along with the WSJ.com subscription model, gaining a few thousand new customers per year? Or this:
By going free and with Murdoch’ls investment in the product – that is, in the reporting and services and with his promotion – WSJ.com can become the unquestioned leading financial information brand worldwide, winning over its many competitors: Yahoo, Reuters (now stronger with Thomson), AOL, FT.com, Forbes, MSN, CNBC. But that will happen only if it goes free. (…) The reason to go free is to explode the brand and make it many times bigger – internationally – than it is today.
Related: The Freakonomics blog is moving to the New York Times site. A scoop for the site. And a model for the future; big news sites hosting popular blogs and enhancing them with journalistic resources?
UPDATE Aug. 14: Advertising Age with another in-depth piece on the same topic, that also mentions The Economist and CNN dropping their online subscription models and going free. Note the trade-offs that have to be considered, as Jeff Lanctot of Avenue A/Razorfish puts it: “As demand grows, your prices can rise more quickly (…) In a subscription business, your pricing is pretty stable.” The Norwegian example is relevant here: For years, the most popular sites have at times been fully booked on their most valuable ad space; hence they have increased the prices.
