How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Blog: Goodbye Dead Trees!
As the new year begins, it’s probably past time to assess what the jump from old media to new media has taught me.
I know what it sounds like–old lady print reporter starts a gen-you-wine blog and goes all gaga about new media or else makes a tsk-tsk list of what needs to change to make blogs as good as mainstream media.
Well, I will try my very hardest not be too navel-gazing in a series of three posts I will make this week about the key things I have learned so far.
Thus, as they say in one of mainstream journalism’s favorite cliches–let’s not bury the lede:
First, after almost eight months of daily blogging for this site, I think it is safe to say that I will probably never write another thing professionally for a print publication and will spend the rest of my career–such that it will be–publishing online only.
Why? Besides saving all those trees, of course–which, let me start off the new year by being completely honest, never occurred to me until just this very second–it’s simple and obvious: The future of all media is digital going forward.
As I always like to keep in mind about everything: Don’t fight the trend.
That might sound a bit glib to some, but I think it’s an important thing to keep in mind as the fortunes of great newspaper companies continue the steady and unwavering declines of the last decade, in what feels a bit like a long and agonizing circling of the drain.
So it’s not exactly a brilliant move to see that and contemplate a move to higher ground–it is simply common sense.
Well, common sense combined with a sense of inevitability that is hard to deny.
I would hope, for example, that if I were around riding for the Pony Express and I saw a newfangled car chug on by for the first time, that I would be one of those people who immediately got the fact that life as I knew it was about to change rather dramatically.
Because that’s exactly what I felt when I first saw early blogs, even though it took me many years to do anything about it and even though I myself had basically stopped getting most of my news and information in print in favor of online.
But now that I am in the pool, so to speak, it feels completely obvious that being part of this medium–which combines all the excitement of discovery that characterizes the best of journalism, with the immediacy of blogging, wherein I can post in minutes what used to take hours and sometimes days–is the only place to be.
It means, for example, I can obsess over stories in ways that you just don’t do in mainstream journalism, coming back again and again to a particular theme or a company or even a person and then drilling down in ways that (hopefully) reveal a lot more to readers.
Case in point, my very first post for BoomTown in mid-April of 2007 was about my being thrilled that Facebook had removed the tagline “A Mark Zuckerberg Production” from the foot of the site. I felt it sent an egomaniacal message.
Can you imagine, for example, even the not-so-humble Steve Jobs sticking his John Hancock all over Apple products? No, you could not. It is an observation that I never could have made easily as a print journalist, but something that I think was an important indicator of Facebook’s (lack of) maturity level.
Since then, I have written about the hyped social-networking site almost incessantly, focusing in particular on its kooky $15 billion valuation and desperate need to find a magical business plan to underfill it. Oh yes, and lots about all those thorny privacy issues too.
I think that ability to keep at it, doing original reporting, and then be quickly informed of more by other bloggers and, most importantly, readers, gives this media a kind of living nature that is almost impossible in print form.
The result is a form of journalism that becomes more powerful as it rolls along, like a very smart snowball, linking and cross-linking and acquiring a massive base of background information that makes a single story so much more.
Oops, I am going a little gaga, aren’t I?
Actually, I think that might be exactly the point I am trying to make here.
Comments
Long time reader, first time commenter — Really enjoy your written and video blogging; your point of view and your chutzpah. Question: where do you get the great images you add to your posts? Starting a blog myself today (New Years Resolution!) and would love to enhance with pics. Thanks for the great work!
Posted by chris rogers at January 2nd, 2008 at 6:48 amCongratulations! I have been reading you since the early days in the Wall Street Journal and have read your books, too. You are an excellent writer with both an ear and an eye, not to mention an understanding of business and a compassionate mind. So online and video are just right for you, and they need you; one of the arguments against online is the quality of the content. Now it will improvie. Others will follow, but you will always be a leader.
You go, girl! I also sent this to you on FB. So you know I think it’s important that you hear it
Happy New Year.
Posted by francine hardaway at January 2nd, 2008 at 8:08 amKara,
Been a long time since we’ve corresponded. Not sure if you remember, but you were a participant on a BusinessWire panel that I moderated regarding social media in June 2005.
I general, I think this post makes the point quite well, and it’s a question worth pondering further.
You make the analogy to the Pony Express, but I actually think the *railroad* industry is even more appropriate. After all, the thing that hobbled the railroad business is that its leaders felt that, well, they were in the railroad business! (That is, instead of the *transportation* business.)
Similarly, it often happens in the print-vs-digital journalism debate that folks conflate the distribution-and-display mechanism (e.g., print) with the content that is conveyed *by* that mechanism (e.g., news, opinion, etc.).
I hope that editorial boards don’t burn lean tissue late into the evening asking themselves “Are we in the print business or the digital business?”
The true power of the digital revolution, IMHO, is that content and form can be separated and applied to whichever medium makes the most sense. While the flexibility of digital presentation is extremely compelling, there’s something to be said for the relative permanence of print. (A case of the medium truly being the message, to crib from McLuhan.)
Anyway… Some thoughts on my first day back… The tiles are burning up on re-entry.
Best in the new year,
/pmg
Posted by Phil Gomes at January 2nd, 2008 at 8:25 amkara: you *do* realize owen & team won’t be doing 100-word summaries anymore, now that Denton put the page-views smackdown on them?
(cheers & hope Rupert doesn’t buy Gawker anytime soon
Posted by dave mcclure at January 2nd, 2008 at 11:54 amDid it ever catch your attention that most of what the top bloggers react to is information reported first by the mainstream media?
Posted by Brian Deagon at January 2nd, 2008 at 1:02 pmI am an avid reader of print news and blogs. Bloggers provide additional insight just as you see in letters to the editor. Bloggers are a great source of immediacy and sometimes lead the mainstream media by days or even weeks on ferreting out useful information.
For the most part, however, bloggers follow what the mainstream media report (unless you are talking about niche-oriented stuff). How often do you see a blogger break a national or international news event like you see the MSM do every day?
Newspaper Web sites, reports by AP and AFP, Reuters, etc. lead the way in keeping us informed about relative global events. Bloggers then react.
I would not be so quick to write of the MSM as aging dinosaurs.
Newspapers are reacting to the disruption by continually innovating in the way they present information on their Web site. Many of these reporters also have their own additional blog sites. The NY Times and USA Today are good examples.
There are millions of blog sites but only a few achieve any real relevancy.
Should the day ever come when most people get most of their information about the world from armchair journalists in pajamas and flip-flops then that will be a sad day for America citizenry.
Hey Brian, I found it to work just the opposite last October - granted, it was a tech story. We put out a news release at AJAXWorld with a survey in it on web app adoption rates and got pickup first from Read/WriteWeb, ars technica and Tech Meme. That was followed by stories in the media, both online and in print. So it’s working both ways - and both impart value. Trade the pros for armchair journalists? No, I want the best of both and when a new permutation pops up I’ll want that, too.
Posted by Marsha Keeffer at January 2nd, 2008 at 2:30 pmBrian (from IBD?),
> Did it ever catch your
> attention that most of
> what the top bloggers
> react to is information
> reported first by the
> mainstream media?
A year old, yes, but still a compelling series of graphs based on “link love” that bear out your point:
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/Slide0010.gif
and, cont’d:
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/Slide0011.gif
Nevertheless, I observe that many leading online voices tend to coalesce into a rather self-congratulatory bunch, meanwhile, the tech and business media are often fond of writing about “horse races” — real, imagined, and wished-for. You put the two tendencies together, and it would seem that the often unnecessarily contentious MSM-vs-blogosphere debate will continue to have plenty of legs.
Like I said above, a core flaw in the debate is that people often incorrectly conflate “mainstream media” with “print”. Doing so certainly makes it a lot easier for critics of mainstream media to pile on, but it puts all parties much further away from discussing the issues constructively.
Posted by Phil Gomes at January 2nd, 2008 at 3:03 pmWhile I don’t mind your kvelling over your online resolve, I can’t quite see what all the fuss is about.
For instance, you’re hardly a lone gun out there in cyberspace policing the big bad digital world. You’re working for Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, which makes you part of the mainstream media, like it or not.
What’s more, while the web may have the potential for stories that snowball in the way that you describe, these tend to be obsessive niche stories–items that have legs among a select crew of people who read a select group of sites and comment on each other’s posts. Tech stories reach the tech heads. Political stories reach political domes. But what about all the rest of us? The web may broaden the sweep of stories for those in the know, but it can narrow their reach.
So: you’re certainly entitled to enjoy the joyous online fray more than the quietly desperate newspaper life. But I don’t think the medium has become the message just yet.
Posted by robert neuwirth at January 5th, 2008 at 1:14 pmre:
“Since then, I have written about the hyped social-networking site almost incessantly…”
Well, you’re really standing out on a creative limb here. Facebook surely was the most under-reported business-tech story of the year.
Yup, you’ve figured out blogging all right. (1) Pick a popular topic; (2) Write self-indulgent posts about joining the revolution; (3) Attracting intelligent people to write comments to your blg posts; (4) Making a higher priority to write *new* posts instead of responding directly to those comments. (and, of course, 5, stroke the A-List.)
Posted by Jon Garfunkel at January 6th, 2008 at 9:23 am