Perspective: All the news that's fit to blog

A few unrelated items for your consideration:

• Last spring, an assembly of editors was asked how many of them knew who Craig Newmark was? A few hands in the audience went up. And how many had heard of Craigslist? A few more people added their hands.

• The latest statistics out of the Audit Bureau of Circulations find that newspaper circulation dropped 2.6 percent in the six months that ended in September. That's more of a drop than in any comparable six-month period since 1991.

• A new Pew survey reports that 48 percent of blog creators are under 30 and 39 percent of them have college or graduate degrees.

All this speaks volumes about the state of the print news business, and its increasingly perilous future. As someone who earns his daily bread working for an online media publication, I'm opening myself to obvious criticism. But truth be told, I want to be proved flat wrong. I grew up with newspapers--starting as a 13-year-old delivery boy for the Long Island Press in Queens, New York, and then in my first professional gigs. What's more, I've been reading the print edition of The New York Times all my adult life and can't imagine ever straying from that daily routine.

But I'm a dinosaur, part of a shrinking generation of daily print newspaper readers who likely will disappear in a few decades. And we're being replaced by folks who "consume media" through the use of RSS feeders, Web portals and blogs.

Some of the most respected print journalists around still treat blogs as if they were lab specimens.

You can chalk some of that up to convenience. Improving technology just makes for an easier, and often, richer reading experience. But let's not let the Fourth Estate off the hook so quickly. The argument that the decline of newspapers was inevitable overlooks the accumulated mistakes committed by the profession over the years.

Consider the Craigslist anecdote. It's mind-boggling that newspaper editors had no idea about the existence of an Internet phenomenon that's sucking away their very life blood--in this case, classified advertising. I wish they had been asked how many of them were clued into blogging. Even if they had heard about blogs, my hunch is that most would have dismissed it as a fad or as an otherwise waste of time.

By now, I thought this old media-new media debate was history. Wishful thinking. Some of the most respected print journalists around still treat blogs as if they were lab specimens--at best interesting oddities but clearly not something to cuddle up to for very long. During a panel discussion on Internet versus traditional media that I attended this week in Santa Clara, tech columnist John Markoff of The New York Times and tech columnist Kara Swisher of The Wall Street Journal sounded like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they repeated the mainstream media's general suspicion of the blogosphere: Who are those guys?

Markoff and Swisher are smart cookies who are clued into the technology business. But there's a shift under way in which authority is being transferred to authors with no accountability other than to themselves and their readership. Does it matter? Should it matter? The mainstream media can look down its nose at the blogosphere, but the numbers tell a different story. More people than ever are reading blogs because of shared affinities and it's coming at the expense of print newspapers.

Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig, who was also on the panel, put it succinctly to traditional media:

"We don't know who your editors are. All our lives we read stuff written by people we don't know that's edited by people we don't know, who might have an agenda."

It's all a matter of perspective, but while these debates drone on, newspapers continue to lose readers and advertisers. If that's not a wake-up call for a new approach, then what is?

Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.

More Perspectives

Audio for your artcile

We have the option of to be able to print, i am not sure if there are other readers who would want to be able to click and listen to the article.

I use a business laptop (small screen) and reading articles does get strenous to my tired eyes.

Would love a service which I click to listen (format to listen instead of print) or download the audio to my mp3 player.

Charles, you may want to review if this is feasible.

[Venkatbu]

Change is Tough

Change is tough. It is easy to see the need for change in others than oneself.

Blogging is moving from the fringe to mainstream. So what are the weak signals: decline in classified revenues, decline in print circulation and the rise of broadband penetration.

When New York Times coined the phrase: All the News Fit to Print, we-the-readers gave them the right to select news from multiple sources (including their own writers and pundits). Now, we-the-readers are creating our own newspaper through boomarks, RSS feeds and blogs.

So, I expect to see major shifts in the years to come.

[mmcgurk]

Q: Where do blogs get their information?

A: Overwhelmingly, from mainstream outlets, from what I've seen. "News" blogs are compilations of links to newspapers and magazines and established, "mainstream" online sites, such as cnet. Very rare is the blogger who is doing original reporting, as opposed to merely snarking about the facts that someone else has gone out and gathered. Craigslist has been effective because it gives away a specific service for free. But that's not a blog as much as an electronic bulletin board. Everybody else is just chattering; the attention-getters draw readers with attitude, not authority. When professional newsgathering goes the way of corset-making, we could end up a society of informational tribalism, where individuals cluster around radically different but equally unreliable versions of what the heck is going on out there.

Areed...

I would not go to someone?s blog with the intention of get real news. Who hold them accountable? Will they apologize if their information is incorrect and someone was hurt because of that? I doubt it, but I could be wrong.

I do however like the fact that anyone can throw their opinion out there for all to read.

Do I think print news will go away anytime soon? Doubtful. Sometimes it's nice to have that in your hands. Besides, I love the smell of a fresh newspaper.

[shanedr-1964330144520240703050]

Newspapers living in the past

Three years ago I contacted my local newspaper suggesting they provide an electronic version of their complete newspaper. I was informed that it would be too expensive; they since have replaced all their presses at a cost of millions of dollars. That there were copyright issues; doing an OCR scan of an article, saving it as a text document and then sending it to others is as simple as getting a Xerox copy used to be. Copyright law won't protect anyone from thieves, it only allows the copyright owner to take them to court.

At present I only subscribe to electronic forms of printed material. So the print media has zero chance of reaching me except through electronic media.

[denisdubois]

Trends in Blogging that should Make Both Sides Nervous

We can't classify blogs as a single genre, so it's impossible to group them as a single threat to conventional media.

A few bloggers are now researching and writing original stories, like http://energypriorities.com, breaking the stereotype of posting opinions about published articles. Some blogs regurgitate marketing press releases unedited, adding zero value in the process. Others gather related information and links and present them to us in a sort of collection.

Sounds like conventional media.

Blog sites are being used heavily by spammers, both to trick the search engines eager to index blogs, and to distribute e-mails (witness the many spam "blogs" on blogspot.com). E-mail is suffering Death by Spamming; will blogging suffer Death by "Blamming"?

There was a fascinating short video released online earlier this year (May 2005 timeframe) about a fictitious future of the media. It may have been called "OmniMedia" but I can't find the URL now. It humorously predicted the acquisition of the last print newspaper by Googlemedia. Internet robots would gather, interpret, and present the news for us.

Humorous or not, it makes a point: search technologies have the potential to replace the function of editors and bloggers who gather related material and present it to us to read. RSS aggregators and iPodder-like apps are the beginning. Add intelligence and you have something really interesting.

And it all depends on someone, somewhere, gathering original facts. Interviewing people. Digging for dirt. Judging fact vs agenda. In other words, Journalists.

Like most technologies, it will be 5-10 years before the average family replaces the daily paper with RSS. We've had the internet for a decade, and we still have paperboys. Adoption just isn't fast enough to suddenly kill off whole industries unexpected. It takes time.

"Someday" is coming.

[H.Perlo]

Blogging, the future of...what?

"Smart" commentators like Mr. Cooper want to appear cutting edge by predicting the demise of the mainstream media. But, as another poster noted, what the heck will bloggers do without it? Where will information come from? Anti-MSMers, so in love with their hipness, don't seem to realize that information doesn't just automatically appear on the Internet. People -- somebody, usually a journalist -- go out and get it, research it and write it. If they're not doing that, you don't get it. What will all the blogging geniuses in their pajamas do when the info's not there? Just blab away mindlessly, I guess. Oh wait, they do that already.

[mwa423]

Anybody remember the paperless office?

I remember a few years ago, all schools, offices, homes, etc. were going to go completely paperless....funny, I still get sucked dry on ink cartridges and still print all types of things.

It's easy to see that more and more things have become more digital, less paperwork and all (now it's all online forms) but there will *always* be paper. There is no computer that can match the price, size, and convience of paper. If you get your laptop wet, you're out $1,000. If you get a newspaper wet, you're out $.50.

This sounds a lot to me like the people who said that newspapers would disappear because we would all get our news from tv. Funny, I get three newspapers a week, read them all, and still watch CNN Headline News.

[rockosmodurnlife]

Heard this before...

Blogs and electronic content killing the print newspaper?

Haven't we heard this yarn before? Television killing radio? The VCR killing the movie theater? The internet company killing "brick-and-mortar" stores? The new economy? Remember eBooks?

For all its worth technology is great but every now and then I want to use something that doesn't have to be plugged in, turned on or recharged on a nightly basis. I still buy plenty of "old timey" print media and I suppose I'm not the only one because newstands I pass by still sell out and the Barnes and Noble I go to is still a two-story building with more books than I can imagine reading.

Oh, and note on blogs. I read five blogs and none of them on a daily basis. So they are obviously not my primary source of news and information. And I don't think I'm in the minority at all. Not that they aren't useful after all it was a blog that uncovered Sony's new rootkit DRM scheme.

[blogbloke]

The Death (or Evolution) of Print Media

Haven't we seen this before? Lawyers dragging independent Paralegals through the courts. Doctors lording it over Nurses and Midwives.

It is no different than Journalists poo-pooing on Bloggers. Just another old-boys network trying to protect its turf. That is all.

Sooner or later they will have to merge. The technologies will blend and the lines will blur. It is inevitable.

...Blog Bloke

[Earl Benser]

Blogging is no more than..

... massive uncontrolled text dumping by a massive collection of
totally unqualified writers, within which might be a few gems by
true writers who are qualified to write on the subject, have
enough knowledge and experience to write on the subject, and
have the skill to write. Up to now, reputable publications filtered
the crap and crap writers from the medium. Blogs make little
attempt to do that,if any at all.

So blogs and bloggers both are totally irrelevant unless they
acquire legitimate credentials. Magic markers of any kind on any
form of bathroom walls don't confer credentials. And so far, I've
yet to run across any blogger group worth a second glance.

[jamestsanders]

Journalism Majors

I don't know what country you went to school in, but here in the United States, journalism students are not the ones taking the classes where they learn the philosophies behind the subjects for which they write.

Apart from the New York Times and a few other proven newspapers, newspapers are no more then people who learned the tools to construct an article that is aesthetically pleasing to the reader. I would rather read a blog post with grammar errors, by someone knowledgeable on the matter, rather than a great article by someone who doesn?t have a clue on what they are writing about.

As more academics become aware of the blogosphere, the ?hidden gems? will become a part of the blog mainstream, but this time however, they will not be censored by editors who need to produce ad revenue.