Well Said is Not Always Well Written
Posted on October 15, 2006
Filed Under What's New, Error and bias |
Dave Winer has been the focal point of a discussion on blogs and journalism these past few days.
Dave’s point is that the reader is now the writer and in ten years time all news will be blog based.
On mediangler I’ve been trying to work some of this out too. Conor O’Neill has pointed out that blogs even when aggregated into what appears to be a coherent interest group, don’t seem to work. They easily become noise.
He’s even begun disaggregating blogs so he can keep with the original voice. Does that say anything about blogs versus journalism?
It raises three points:
1. Are readers really writers? Some are but we know participation is always on the low side. The reader is a writer sounds good, but it’s a neat turn of phrase on the way to becoming a cliché.
2. The real problem lies with newspapers’ cost structures. They, ironically, will lead the way to the mega-blogging future - the Guardian now has a user-content only travel section on its website. That is gratis content. Of course newspapers will go for free content wherever they can get it. And in a highly literate world they will get plenty. I sense that the skills of writing though are not universally learned - it takes years of practice to write well and it takes friction, disappointment, failure and in short a training ground. That seems to be absent from many people’s thinking. Good writers attract audiences and deservedly so.
3. But perhaps the most important point Conor raises is what about editors? How many of us can continue to act as the editors of our own news and opinions stream, even with the help of techmeme and other aggregators?
Editors are important figures - they get in the way, they make mistakes but they generally teach you to write better, uphold a set of values and keep reminding you of what those values are, have a good feel for what a reader base wants to learn about, have news sense, story selection savvy, good packaging skills. Hell, I want to be one.
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haydn,
as a former journalist (as of a couple days ago) now working for a blogging network, you raise some good points. truth be told, blogs will have a difficult time completely replacing newspapers because most blogs are opinion-driven - often commenting on news produced by professional organizations such as newspapers. look at often the NYT is cited within the blogosphere.
as you point out, one of the biggest issues facing newspapers going forward is controlling costs at a time when the more advertising is moving online. this means newspapers must be far more strategic about what and how they cover the “news”. business sections, for example, should probably spend less time on earnings, and more time providing insight into what the news actually means. the same goes for sports sections, which will likely spend less time providing game coverage given the “news” is available on the web minutes after a game ends.
of course, this sea change is happening at the same time that more consumers are getting their fixes from the web. frankly, it’s a complex future for newspapers with no easy answers.
That’s an interesting point about business sections. I made a similar point to Haydn in an email. I find the business sections nowadays to be little more than rehashed press releases. I’d start buying newspapers again if the business analysis came back.
The blogosphere still has a long way to go where depth is concerned. Most tech blogs are only concerned with today’s hot topic and being first to post rather than doing measured studies and analyses of trends and really tough evaluations of new sites/products. Some of the web 2.0 ones in particular have degenerated into fan-mags. Having an editor to kick their asses would do the world of good for a lot of the probloggers in that area.
Among bloggers, I believe the network is the editor. It takes some time and some patience to fact-check your assumptions by cross-referencing other bloggers and you set yourself up for frustration when you force yourself to read the work of those you wouldn’t invite for coffee, but those two methods ensure you never step too far into the world of the preposterous by blogging about things that illuminate your ignorance.
I believe Dave Winer reads articles from major publications in full before he responds to them. I’m not sure the print journos afford him the same respect.
Most of us don’t have the luxury of contributing to that editing process though bernie - I meam we can for a while and those of us with enough interest will for a long time but in the end it’s the kind of potato we’ll drop because we have to get on with other things. Editors also serve many other functions and not least is helping people refine the art of writing. I was trying to make the point yesterday that the leading light in tech reporting - techcrunch - is abysmal as a piece of written journalism. That too will have to change. We can’t and won’t just let go of the art.
Mark, thanks for dropping by. I think there’s an equal amount of nonsense talked about where newspapers are going and where blogs are headed. Most of us want to earn a decent living and most newspapers have made that increasingly difficult so I think they’re getting it in the neck, and they have shortcomings; blogging on the other hand as you say is to opinion driven. I expect to see a new genre of electronic publication emerge that pulls in the best of both - it might have been called Huffington but for the personalities involved.
[…] Sarà davvero così? Nient’affatto, replicano i reporter più tradizionali. Già il titolo di un’editoriale di ZDNet, Journalism 2.0: News or chatter?, suggerisce che nel mondo online si fanno solo pettegolezzi, ribadendo piuttosto l’essenzialità dei principi della “vecchia scuola” del giornalismo”. Analogamente l’influente giornalista Haydn Shaughnessy si chiede: «I lettori sono davvero scrivere? Alcuni sì, ma sappiamo bene che la partecipazione è comunque scarsa». Aggiungendo che, nonostante tutto, «i capo-redattori sono figure importanti». Ci va giù ancora più pesante il tecnologo inglese Conor O’Neill: «La blogosfera ha ancora molto da imparare per quanto concerne profondità d’analisi… Parecchi blog del web 2.0 sono degenerati in fan-magazine. Se ci fosse un redattore a dar loro un bel calcio nel sedere, farebbe un mondo di bene ai stessi pro-blogger». […]
[…] Hayden Shaughnessy: Well Said is Not Always Well Written Hayden Shaughnessy examines the recieved wisdom of Web 2.0 journalism. Readers are only rarely writers, and the real issue is newspapers’ cost stuctures as advertising moves online. (tags: web2.0 journalism newspapers advertising) […]
[…] with del.icio.us | Email this entry | TrackBack URI | Digg it | Track with co.mments | | Cosmos Click here forcopyright permissions! Copyright 2006 Mathew Ingram […]
[…] Haydn Shaughnessy asks: Are readers really writers? Some are but we know participation is always on the low side. The reader is a writer sounds good, but it’s a neat turn of phrase on the way to becoming a cliché. […]