Are journalist blogs pointless?
September 28th, 2007
There were a couple of posts regarding whether blogs as being pointless or not. Mainly that blogs become too personal and have little value added once the journalist has done his work.
Personally, I think that blogs (not in the current form though) will take over newspapers so I think blogs are useful. I don’t even see the point of having big newspapers or media companies other than to allow journalists to receive a salary. With a decent blog business model, good journalists will flea their workplace and go digital. Good people get noticed. Some (most?) bloggers are not journalists yet they manage to attract a lot of people. Bad journalists will have to look for other jobs.
Me? I don’t have time to read the newspaper or watch the news. That being said, I think that the current “blog platform” is not efficient for news coverage. I want focused, localised content. I can’t have this right now but that’s something I’m working on slowly (shameless plug).
We’ve seen it with YouTube and Joost: big companies are starting to be nervous and updating your front page is simply not enough to survive… I know I will be telling my grand kids that “in the old days” we used to be reading our news on a piece of paper that they printed during the night which was then delivered by a paperboy. Wow, I get excited. I will have so many neat things to tell my grand kids after all!
Posted in Blogs, YulNews, media | Comments (2)
September 28th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
A couple of things.
1. As a commenter on my blog post notes, the definition of “blog” is vague. Everyone has their own ideas of what they are, but they shouldn’t be evaluated any differently from other websites. Some are good, some are bad.
2. They’ve been predicting the end of the newspaper for decades. I’m not saying they’re not going to get hurt from this (just like they were hurt from the invention of radio and TV), but it’s still way too early to be writing their obituary.
3. Big media allows for the efficient pooling of resources. Journalists are paid more in big media (compared to, say, small community publications), they have better unions and better job security. Not everyone is just going to leave that for a blog with Google Ads.
4. I think people overestimate how successful individual blogs are. Only the top 100 or so get enough revenue to run a company. The rest might get enough to pay the bills of one person, but that’s about it. The vast majority of bloggers make less money than the vast majority of newspaper reporters, and it’ll be a while before that changes.
October 6th, 2007 at 6:49 am
Thank you for sharing!