Comments on: I Love Blogging, But Blogs Aren't Replacing Newspapers

By: mattmaroon

mattmaroon — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 03:53:14 +0000

I tried that Datapresser out. It really is pretty simple, but not that useful. I can see how it's a timesaver when all of your articles follow a pretty simple format though. For instance, every single TechCrunch article about a funding round could trivially use that.

By: Steven Kovar

Steven Kovar — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 12:45:53 +0000

I actually recall reading a post somewhere about how some TechCrunch contributors/editors use a service called Datapresser to, in a sense, quick-write their articles for them. http://datapresser.com/

I wouldn't doubt it; half of their articles are so sloppy it looks like some almost-but-not-quite piece of software wrote it rather than a human who speaks proper english.

There have been several articles and posts and discussions coming to the conclusion that the more posts your blog has the more traffic and attention your blog will get—if you can use software to pump out 30 "passable" posts a day rather than write up 5 or 6 SOLID pieces, I can see why they would give it a whirl. That said, you'd think they would be able to edit them post-composition adequately.

By: mattmaroon

mattmaroon — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:33:13 +0000

They aren't the same function though. I read the New York Times or the Economist for accurate, in-depth discussions about important topics, often with top-notch sources (sometimes inside ones) that would be unavailable to a blog. I read blogs for very shallow but often more current news.

It's like the difference between NPR and Headline News.

By: Shalmanese

Shalmanese — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:30:08 +0000

No, blogs are not electronic newspapers in the same way that television is not plays you can watch at home and emails are not letters you send via computer. The argument is not that the results are the same, it's that the *function* is the same. If I want to bore myself mindless for an hour, it's possible that I could go to a play but it's far more likely that I'll watch the latest episode of Heroes. Similarly, my news consumption has been slowly shifting away from MSM into blogs.

One of the universal effects of opening up a medium to a wider audience is that the variance in quality shoots up dramatically. Which means, yes, it's ridiculously easy to find blog posts to poke fun about. At the same time, I think the level of science reporting in the blog world is far in advance of anything you could find in the Mainstream media, I've read better reports about the bailout crisis from blogs than from mainstream sources and technology coverage is ridiculously more thorough.

So yes, it's trivially easy to show that blogs are a different type of media from newspapers, what's important is to ask whether they end up different in what people are using them for.