What Won’t Save Newspapers?

Posted on October 27, 2006
Filed Under For Argument's Sake, Insights |

Techdirt’s carrying a short piece on newspapers’ continuing inability to get the Internet right (OK the Guardian looks good but it’s costing them $25 million a year in losses).

I’d already been thinking earlier in the day about how I write one way for the blog and another way for papers and mags. Pinning down that difference…. Yesterday I had to write a 600 word piece for a column I’m discussing with a newspaper. While I was writing it I probably put three or four posts up, at least equaling 600 words.

Why did the column take all day? First because I was forever blogging! But seriously. The first draft read like a blog. Then I examined it and thought in the good old days when newspapers were still newspapers, you spent a good while on an opening paragraph. You then shaped the story following that paragraph and then you concluded. And then you went back to the opening and made sure you had a good match up between the beginning and the end. And then you realised half your sentences had nothing to do with the story you set up in the first par, so it was back to the nuts and bolts, stripping words out. And then the word count, you’re 50% over so again strip words out. Doing that made you realise you had a better story in there or a better way to tell it so start over.

Blogging by contrast is a process marked by flow. You get into a flow - you might check digg or the feeds and then wonder to techmeme, a comment here and a comment there,a post wells up inside and you go for it, but then you’re still checking back. And it never ends but it’s a different kind of checking. Stories end, blogging doesn’t. It’s all flow.

I’m not sure I like being in the flow so much, or that it is rewarding but I do it. Read the post below about Henry Jenkins work and you’ll see it’s a profoundly different approach to thinking as well as to writing.

Now I haven’t said one is better than the other but earlier today I did say I thought blogs will pad out with more applications and content and hopefully we’ll begin to build in more of a sense of completion.

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