Eugene Kane blogs today about the irrelevancy of blogging and asks, “The end of blogging?”:
Just a few years ago, citizen bloggers were all the rage. They were actually going to replace the mainstream media, remember?
The successful blogs in today’s media are actually pretty mainstream, particularly political blogs that are frequently cited by newspaper columnists or editorial writers. The days of solitary citizen bloggers sending their opinions out into the blogosphere to attract attention seem to be a thing of the past.
As this article points out, it’s more about Twitter and Facebook these days.
This is interesting – and incorrect - on a number of levels. First, the hype about ‘citizen bloggers’ that reached it’s fever pitch just a year or two ago was inflated by the very same traditional media that’s now predicting it’s death. You couldn’t pick up a copy of the newspaper or periodical that wasn’t hyping how these “citizen bloggers” were going to change the world(!).
People who write weblogs that happened to be filling the considerable gaps in local coverage by the local traditional media never set out with the goal of being labeled some silly ‘citizen blogger/journalist’ tag. They did it because there was a need for coverage of local events the traditional media wasn’t willing to waste their time on.
Ironically, it was the very same traditional media who’s lack of “real” issue coverage provided the opportunity for regular folks with weblogs to make a niche that was gushing over this new corps of average Joe/Jane reporters. In their race to sensationalize and exploit a pretty simple concept – average people taking more interest in their communities – they only continued to emphasize the ‘style over substance’ mentality that was in part the cause of their own struggles and decline.
Secondly, about Twitter and Facebook… That’s either a gross misunderstanding of what those services do, or an admission that you have no idea what kind of role weblogs serve.
Twitter and Facebook – two services I utilize myself – are nothing more than tools. Useful and practical tools to be sure, but tools the same way that weblogs or email are. They’re different kinds of tools that fit different kinds of jobs. For someone to say weblogs are useless because Facebook or Twitter is “where it’s at” is about as ridiculous as someone stating that every screwdriver and saw in their toolbox was useless because they were momentarily pounding a nail into a piece of wood with a hammer.
Over the years, it’s become easy to identify people who talk about technology and emerging social networking & communication tools but have zero understanding of their utility because all those people share a common trait: predicting the death of one tool in order to justify their excitement/focus of the ‘next big thing’.
Listening to some ‘experts’ out there, e-mail has been ‘dead’ for nearly a decade. Yet it remains the most popular way for people on the Internet to communicate period. The same with weblogs. The same will happen to Twitter, and the same will happen to everything after that. In some ways, it’s the nature of people who don’t truly understand any of the ways these things can, do and will work in harmony as part of a complete tool box.
That’s because as impractical and limiting as it would be for me to have nothing but a set of hammers to be able to use in building a house or fixing my car, it would be impractical to rely solely on something like Twitter with it’s limits of 140 characters and limited reach.
How could I have gotten past the first sentence in writing my thoughts here if I had to rely just on Twitter? Or Facebook?
Of course, the inverse is true as well of weblogs. Sometimes a weblog isn’t the right tool for quick blurbs about where I’m at or what I’m doing as Twitter might be. Likewise, there are a million things that Facebook does that no weblog can ever hope match.
So when I need to write something that requires both thought and explanation unencumbered by length or word count, I’ll use my weblog just as when I need to change a spark plug, I’ll skip over the stapler or hex wrench and select the right tool for the job.
Or more likely, as I do today, I’ll continue to use the tools together to make the combined product more effective than any one could be on it’s own.
Finally, I get that perhaps it was just an off the cuff remark by Mr. Kane, who’s articles I enjoy in the MJS, and nothing serious was meant of it. But I also realize that his employer has gone all in first the weblogging craze, then the Facebook thing, and most recently you couldn’t open up a copy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel without being forced to get the “Twitter angle” in every one of it’s stories.
Perhaps if they spent less time jumping from craze to anointed craze or spending resources on silly ‘tweet shows’ that add zero value to journalism where they show elderly folks “why the craze matters!” as a way of justifying their own attention to it, and focused more on, you know, reporting the news instead of capitalizing on a fad, they wouldn’t be slashing jobs left and right.
As for the answer to Mr. Kane’s question, “The end of blogging?”… Well, I don’t get into the business of making predictions in the world of technology, but I’d bet a small wager that the “citizen bloggers” like me are still here and still digging long after the Journal Sentinel has declared bankruptcy and closed it’s doors.
I live in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, WI with my wife Jen, our daughter Emerson, and sons Carter and Colton.
Very interesting. I agree that this guy is off his rocker, but I do see blogging as largely a market signal to traditional media that their business models don’t work anymore and their products were bloated and overpriced. How much of a newspaper do you typically read? 25%? Yet you pay for the whole thing, and the newspaper pays people to “fill the columns”. The successful blogs are focused on a single topic or very few highly related topics… kind of like a column perhaps?
The shotgun blast method of content delivery is what is dead. I don’t agree with people who say that blogging will take the place of “mainstream media”. Bloggers make poor investigative journalists (present company excluded). And if you look at the personal finance blogosphere (hate that word), you’ll note that it’s mostly a case of the blind leading the blind (although the market corrects for this; see: http://badmoneyadvice.com/ who would have no content and audience if not for the pitiful nature of PF blogs), so quality is a big concern as well.
The big barrier is that no one can get micropayments to work and everyone’s relying on advertising. But if everyone is sending traffic to everyone else, who is creating and selling anything of value? It is an unsustainable model that would have been a bubble economy if not for the constantly decreasing ad payment rates over the last decade. But someone will figure out how to charge for news content, and people will pay because quality news cannot be free in the long term. Blogs will still have their place, especially to keep the mainstream media in check like they did during the Media Dark Ages of the Bush Administration (did investigative journalists take an 8-year vacation???), but blogging and news are not the same thing, and neither one of them is going away.
Blogging is to real news as letters-to-the-editor are to newspapers.
Will be very interesting to see how people transition from blogging to “real news” and whether there needs to be a big company behind them in order for payment infrastructure and credibility to enable the difference.
Interesting stuff…
Good insight Matt, and I’d be the first to agree that ‘blogging’ and news reporting/journalism aren’t the same thing.
One “weblog”, and I use the term loosely, that bridges the gap is talking points memo. Through ad revenue they’re able to pay a full time staff of reporters who do a lot of the kind of digging that we used to see from local media outlets. The work the produce is high quality and highly targeted.
In some ways, you can apply the old “cathedral and the bazaar’ model to reporting of local stories. It’s not a perfect match, few things are of course, but there are some similarities to be drawn. Time will tell if the number of “bloggers”, a term that I hate by the way, will be able to match the old network in terms of quality and relevancy.
Most blogs don’t even try to do any kind of in depth local reporting of course, but focus on at times trivial issues about eating peanut butter sandwiches. Those who do make a difference and have an impact in their local communities shouldn’t be lumped in with those however. And with all things, generalizing is usually a bad idea, but I think you know what I’m getting at.
Interesting point re: cathedral and the bazaar. Not to pick on the personal finance bloggers again, but that is a good example of where the community is not smart enough to weed out the crap from the goodies. But I agree that in many other subjects where the general public has a relatively good understanding (or at least enough to call BS on the stuff that doesn’t make any sense), the communities reading the blogs can vote with their clicks, so to speak, and the good stuff should rise to the top. There are also sites like digg and Tip’d which formalize this sort of community self-policing.
Like I said, very interesting stuff. I’m not smart enough to guess where things are headed with mainstream content delivery, but it’s got to happen in the next couple of years or they’ll all be bankrupt. Peanut-butter bloggers aside, it will be interesting to see the line drawn between the more useful bloggers (for lack of a better phrase) and the mainstream journalists, and how the latter makes the case for “value add”, enough to convince us to pay for it (because I don’t think the advertising model is sustainable, in much the same way that free, ad-supported newspapers never really took off).
One thing that neither of us is addressing is of course those who do the work with no financial reward expected. Rather, there are people out there who do the work just because they want to influence policy or have a say in the shape of how the debate is framed.
That leads to another interesting question about those who contribute to contribute vs. those who contribute because they’re paid to do so, something the article Mr. Kane links to talks about briefly.
I’m not smart enough to see where this is all going either, but I have to put some faith in those who “do” for the sake of their communities and the issues that impact them on a very real level. And that was kind of my original point… Regardless of the medium those who “do” choose to use to make the voices heard, they’re not going away anytime soon.
In fact, as technology allows their voices to be heard by a larger audience than has ever been available in history, I think the trend of local citizens engaged and speaking out for the issues they’re passionate about will only continue. Which is a good thing of course.