26 July 2009
News and blogging
31/07/09 15:03 Filed in: Social
networking trends
There’s an excellent piece on the relationship
between traditional news reporting and blogging on
Mashable today. It makes a
great job of looking at the argument from many
sides.
Quite honestly, to read journalists talking about blogging you’d think it was a short-lived, evil thing that’s not going to last at all. Here’s Wired from a while ago, and there are many others. Mashable makes the excellent point that the newspapers have a vested interest in doing blogs down - established journalists (that would include me, then) are terrified for their jobs.
Well, yes and no, and up to a point. What’s frightening people a bit is change.
I’d like to take you back a few years to the early 1980s. I was at school, my father - still alive - was a proofreader on the Guardian newspaper. We lived in Tooting. It was a good life I thought at the time - still do. Dad, however, was concerned. He was having to learn about something called a word processor and it was causing him problems. He didn’t think he’d survive the technological change at the Guardian.
In fact he was really unlucky and thanks to a heart attack he literally didn’t survive. I’m confident he’d have made the adjustment and continued had things been different - but it was the change that was causing the issue, not the technology. He could see the change would come and couldn’t be - shouldn’t be - stopped.
It’s the same now, I suggest. The journalists and indeed bloggers who are going to best will be the ones who don’t buy into all this nonsense about the new or old technology somehow being the enemy. When TV started it was going to kill radio. It didn’t. When radio started it was going to kill the theatre. It didn’t. Now we have the Internet - blogging, Tweeting, whatever you want, and panic that it’s going to wipe out newspapers and magazines, and some newspapers and magazines hitting back by saying blogging’s not going to work. My bet is they both will, there will be some realignment of niches by all means but ten years from now both media will still be around.
You never know - the more open-minded practitioners might actually find they learn something from each other.
Quite honestly, to read journalists talking about blogging you’d think it was a short-lived, evil thing that’s not going to last at all. Here’s Wired from a while ago, and there are many others. Mashable makes the excellent point that the newspapers have a vested interest in doing blogs down - established journalists (that would include me, then) are terrified for their jobs.
Well, yes and no, and up to a point. What’s frightening people a bit is change.
I’d like to take you back a few years to the early 1980s. I was at school, my father - still alive - was a proofreader on the Guardian newspaper. We lived in Tooting. It was a good life I thought at the time - still do. Dad, however, was concerned. He was having to learn about something called a word processor and it was causing him problems. He didn’t think he’d survive the technological change at the Guardian.
In fact he was really unlucky and thanks to a heart attack he literally didn’t survive. I’m confident he’d have made the adjustment and continued had things been different - but it was the change that was causing the issue, not the technology. He could see the change would come and couldn’t be - shouldn’t be - stopped.
It’s the same now, I suggest. The journalists and indeed bloggers who are going to best will be the ones who don’t buy into all this nonsense about the new or old technology somehow being the enemy. When TV started it was going to kill radio. It didn’t. When radio started it was going to kill the theatre. It didn’t. Now we have the Internet - blogging, Tweeting, whatever you want, and panic that it’s going to wipe out newspapers and magazines, and some newspapers and magazines hitting back by saying blogging’s not going to work. My bet is they both will, there will be some realignment of niches by all means but ten years from now both media will still be around.
You never know - the more open-minded practitioners might actually find they learn something from each other.
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