BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Speak to power

13 comments on Speak to power

Speak to power
: Next week, I’m going to the Online News Association (man, I’ve been to more confabs in a month than I went to in the last nine years) to be the growly noncomformist on the panel on weblogging. I’ll share my notes later.

But I want to hear from you, fellow bloggers. What would you say to these people who run newspaper-affiliated web services if you were sitting there instead of me (which is what they should have done, by the way)?

What advice do you have for them?

What do you think they should be doing with weblogs?

Comment away, please….

13 responses to “Speak to power”

  1. Jeremy Brown Avatar
    Jeremy Brown

    I would love to see some blogging on the behind-the-scenes editorial process, about where stories come from, which ones make page one (or web equivalent) and that sort of thing. I’ve always wished we could have a c-span channel devoted to covering editorial meetings at news entities like the New York Times. I think a blog could provide much of the same. If a news organzation feels this would be dangerous, then that’s a sign that something’s wrong, something they probably ought to fix. Transparency, in other words, would be a huge service to the public.

  2. tom Avatar
    tom

    Jeremy: the problem with that is, it gives away the stories you’re working on … if you’ve got a big scoop in the works you don’t want to broadcast it to the world.

  3. Jeremy Brown Avatar
    Jeremy Brown

    Tom: that’s true, I can see the problem. But discussions after the fact could be very valuable too, e.g. “here’s the foreign affairs editor on why we ran so many stories on Nairobi last month” or “Here’s why we rejected this story that was later picked up by the Guardian.” And also general practices: “This is why we sat on the XYZ scandal for 3 months: when you get this kind of story, you’ve got to do A, B and C before you run with it…last year, for example…” I don’t know, I’m probably being naive. You occasionaly hear news people talk about this stuff in interviews and I always find it intersting. Maybe it’s just journalism 101, but in this form it would give an opportunity for readers to question some of these practices and decisions.

  4. hugh macleod Avatar
    hugh macleod

    Well, newspaper blogs live and die by the same rules as any other blog. Just the newspaper will have more resources to put behind it than a regular schmoe.
    The best blogs didn’t start off with some big master plan. They started of with (a) the desire to blog and (b) the desire and ability to be engaging. Lots of trial and error. I mean, when you strted Buzzmachine did you know what would happen? I’m guessing you didn’t. I’m guessing you just started doing it, and the whole thing took on a life of its own.
    You don’t make a big ‘plan’ to be engaging. You just get on with it. If what you’re writing has enough passion and knowledge behind it, then good things will happen.
    The proccess is organic: it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it.
    How genuine the newspaper’s desire to engage the blogosphere is the most important thing. Unlike a traditional, storefront-shaped website, blogging is not about creating a “thing”, it’s about creating a “process”.
    So my advice to newspapers would be: think about the intensity of the process you want to create, rather than the actual website itself. To only do the latter would be putting the cart before the horse.

  5. kkl Avatar
    kkl

    Hugh has excellent comments. I would add the medium’s desire for telling the truth. If the idea is to sell their own spin, stay home. I have enough to wade through here on the nblogosphere.

  6. Kevin Marks Avatar
    Kevin Marks

    Make sure you tell them they have their business model completely backwards.
    Currently they give away the news and charge egregiously for the olds.
    $2.95 for a week-old article? In England we called last weeks newspaper ‘fish-wrap’.
    They post their first edition online hours before it hits the streets, meaning that by the simple expedient of staying up late, Andrew Sullivan can have a rebuttal of the NYT editorials online and ready before the paper is thrown onto the driveway.
    Free the archives, charge for the breaking news.

  7. hugh macleod Avatar
    hugh macleod

    i.e. “fish-wrap” because old newspaper is the traditional English wrapping used for fish & chips.
    Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as “things”, rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A Joi-Ito-like brain trust, held cohesive by good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won’t (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.
    Hmmm… somebody must’ve spiked my drink.

  8. Dann Avatar
    Dann

    Perhaps blogs could be used as an adjunct to the traditional “letters to the editor”? Facilitating a discussion on specific editorial positions?
    And of course, giving local columnists a wider forum. I’ve had the good fortune to corresponde with local reporters and columnists via e-mail. Their “personal” comments have been most illuminating. Further public discussion might be equally so.
    One wonders if the Old Media will regard a writer’s blogging as an additional task to be done in addition to their regular writing or if there will be a slight reduction in their work load in order to facilitate posting blog entries?

  9. tom Avatar
    tom

    > I’ve had the good fortune to corresponde with local reporters and columnists via e-mail.’
    You’re on to something there… if reporters had blogs they could post their answers online to provide the same info to anybody else wondering the same thing.
    The problem is implementation: a reporter might get 50 emails in response to a single story, and might opt to reply to, say, two or three. How do you allow all those other questions to be posted — and the reporter to respond only to the ones he chooses — without making the reporter look like he’s ignoring everybody else, or, worse yet, has something to hide because of all these unanswered questions?
    The problem w/interactivity is that it doesn’t scale well from one person to a large audience.
    Then again, if every reporter’s story was posted in blog form with a comments feature attached, questions could be posted and others who know the answer could provide it, the same way they do here and at every other blog that has a comments feature.

  10. hugh macleod Avatar
    hugh macleod

    Hey, it’s Darwinism. The NYT gets thousands of letters a day- it publishes the best half dozen. The same will apply to blogs. It has nothing to do with scaling- The strong survive, the weak are culled, depending on the space available- the same applies to blogging- get over it.

  11. Kevin Marks Avatar
    Kevin Marks

    The scale argument is Clay’s and it is somewhat specious. Blogs scale fine; it is email that doesn’t scale.
    Let people post comments on their own blogs and link back, and the smart journalists will be able to find them with Technorati or google.

  12. button Avatar
    button

    Jeff has repeatedly pointed out that the reading Public often knows stuff that the Media reader doesn’t know.
    In this case the Media should announce a ‘Weblog Fever’ rush period during which local bloggers should submit or nominate blogs in their neighborhood that are exciting.
    That will enable the Media Hub to ‘seed’ some blogs into their blogroll and should start them off with something.

  13. henrycopeland Avatar
    henrycopeland

    There will be plenty of cuddly things said, no doubt, so here are a few bricks to hurl at the pompous pulp-pimps.
    Remind ’em that bloggers have something a newspaper can never have — personality. Bloggers don’t need to consult a committee before grabbing the latest news or technology and shaking it to pieces. Bloggers will work weekends because they are working for themselves, not The Corporation. And bloggers participate in the fastest energy slinger since the cyclotron — the blogosphere.
    Finally, pick some smirking simp in the audience and ask how big is the circulation of his 100-year-old newspaper. Point out that with 1/500 the manpower and with just a few hours of work a day, some two-year-old bloggers are already reaching more readers and changing more minds. And, le coup de grace: blog audiences are growing 10% a month, while his employer’s is shrinking 1% a year.