MattMaroon.com

One thing that makes me want to punch people in the face is when I hear “blogs are the new newspapers”. No, they’re not.

For one thing, there’s quality. Even the worst newspaper has pretty well-written articles. They mostly just buy the national stuff from AP/Reuters, but even the local stuff they produce themselves is copy-edited and fact-checked.

Blogs are just some guy who, if he’s bothering to give facts at all, probably just pulled them out of his ass. I generally try to cite where I can, but even that often is some stuff I found on Wikipedia (though I’ll often cite from the source shown there) or Google. That puts me way beyond most blogs (and I don’t do this for profit) but it’s not exactly New York Times standards.

Also, there’s just plain grammar. Here’s a quote from TechCrunch yesterday:

Compared to other onlne calendar’s such as Google’s. there is nothing novel…

That’s one of the largest, most profitable blogs on the net, they don’t even run a spell check. That sort of thing is not uncommon. I swear sometimes I think Arrington is hiring drunken, dyslexic Indian 3^rd graders in order to save money. What are these bloggers typing articles in? If you just used Firefox and typed it into the WordPress form, which nobody serious about blogging does, even that has a spell-checker. And if, like me, you type it up in Word (where it lights up with more red and green than a Wal-Mart in December) and then use Office 2007′s bad ass publish to blog feature, or in some program like Windows Live Writer, you couldn’t write that poorly if you tried. In fact, here’s that same sentence again if I just right click the things with squiggly lines under them and pick the default correction option:

Compared to other online calendars such as Google’s. There is nothing novel…

At the end, there’s even yet another green squiggly under the first part telling me it’s a fragment, so, unless I had recently been huffing Lysol, I’d realize that period should have been a comma. While I do realize that most people don’t feel it their life’s calling to protect the English language, as some internet quiz once told me mine was (therefore it must be true), that sort of stuff just makes you look hacky and amateurish.

Please don’t take that as some sort of hating on TechCrunch, it’s not just them. It’s every blog, even the professional ones. And until the quality of the best blogs at least matches the quality of the worst newspapers there will always be a place for old school writing. What the delivery method and revenue models will be is debatable, but the demand is not.

The internet has largely destroyed newspaper’s revenue streams, but it’s not due to blogs. They’ve killed classifieds with Craigslist and eBay. They’ve hurt advertising with AdWords. And they’re wrecking subscriptions and other content-based revenue with Digg, Yahoo News, etc. Why buy the cow when you can read the milk online?

That part is largely the newspapers’ fault for commoditizing the articles by purchasing most of their national content from large syndicates. Now news, with the exception of local stuff, is just something you compete for on price, and they’ll never beat the web there because the cost of serving up a web-page is a tiny fraction of the cost of a sheet of paper. When the big aggregators like Yahoo have all the same news as every local paper, there’s just no way for the little guys to compete.

So what do periodicals do going forward? I think step one is to make top-quality, original content. The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal are all great examples. They’re still spending the big bucks on star writers, giving them the time and budget they need to write solid articles, and mixing it with a little blog-style content online too.

I’m unsure if, in the long run, it will be best given away for free, or if subscription fees are ideal. I’m still unconvinced that the WSJ should drop its paywall, since it seems to have a ton of subscribers and no serious competition in the high quality financial news segment. The New York Times seems to be entirely free, and The Economist has some weird hybrid model where you can get the print stuff for free, but you can pay for something and they don’t really tell you what. That model might actually be worth something if, when you click on the subscribe link, all you got wasn’t a page that said This article is premium content. In order to gain access to it please either Log in, Activate your complimentary web account if you are a print subscriber, or Subscribe now, with “Subscribe now” linking you to that same page it’s on.

One thing I am sure of is that people will want high quality original content forever, and in its absence on free sites, which economics may enforce, even be willing to pay. Good content is expensive. It means paying good writers to pursue stories that often lead nowhere at all. It means paying fact-checkers (especially in the post-Jayson Blair era) and copy editors. Or at least a free spell-checker.

This entry was posted on October 9, 2008 at 1:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.