Interesting article on how newspapers are struggling to come to terms with blogs, beginning with the great synthesizer of all truth, Coach Bobby Knight:
Explosive college basketball coach Bobby Knight once summed up his views on journalists, and in doing so may have unintentionally explained why newspapers are struggling to deal with Internet bloggers.
‘All of us learn to write in the second grade,’ Knight said while the coach at Indiana University, according to a 1983 story in the Washington Post. ‘Most of us go on to greater things.’
Heh. You can guess who the second-graders are, and who those who moved on to “greater things” might be.
Initially caught off guard by blogs, newspapers and old-guard news agencies are now racing to present their own. So far, the results have been mixed. While papers such as the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman are using blogs to give readers a news voice they never had before, other papers like the Washington Post are struggling with everything from charges of plagiarism in their blogs to being labeled with the word every editor dreads–boring.
So what’s the solution? Some solutions like BlogBurst allow newspapers to syndicate certain posts. Other newspapers have simply started their own blogs (Washington Post and the Free Lance-Star respectively).
Needless to say, most newspapers still don’t get the medium, and this confusion and ignorance leads more than a few editors and journalists towards not co-operation, but honest to goodness hatred towards a competitor.
Another hurdle for newspapers is making sure that their blogs don’t bore readers, said Patrick Williams, managing editor of the Dallas Observer, a weekly publication. He says that too often newspaper blogs are filled with leftovers from stories too long to fit in the paper that day.
“They’re filled with all the news not fit for print,” Williams wrote. “They’re a place where writers go when reporting is just too hard. Let us pray…that blogs can go back to what they should be: teenagers and college students talking about sex and music.”
Despite his distaste for news blogs, Williams says he values news and he believes that news stories are what drive the need for blogs and not the other way around.
“If I were the king of journalism, I’d force newspapers to stop publishing for a month,” Williams said. “Then let’s see what would happen to blogs. Facts have to be the basis of opinion at some point. And if a blogger is collecting facts, then at what point does the publication cease being a blog and become an Internet news site?”
See what I mean?
Bloggers on the whole are opinion editors. We share much in common with the pamphleteers of the Revolutionary War, and some with the “men of letters” of old.
The best synthesis is to (a) turn articles into blog posts where readers can comment on them, (b) turn bloggers into opinion writers, and allow journalists to (c) write without the heavy hand of editors and (d) allow different journalists to write on the same topic.
For some sources, journalists are irreplaceable. For in-depth exploration, bloggers have the upper hand. For a dual synthesis that doesn’t stray into the “daily me” Cass Sunstein warned of (where readers get only the information they agree with), mainstream media will have to adapt to what is desired information from their consumers.
This is a bullet we should have seen coming in the 1990’s with the advent of talk radio.