A Financial Times Article on Blogging

Washington DC-based writer Trevor Butterworth has a long, but informative article in the February 17, 2006 edition of FT.com, the Financial Times' online presence. It's headlined "Time for the last post." His point: "blogging would have been little more than a recipe for even more Internet tedium if it had not been seized upon in the US as a direct threat to the mainstream media and the conventions by which they control news."

Butterworth has an interesting quote from "Choire (pronounced “Corey”) Sicha, a former gallery owner and now a senior editor at The New York Observer, a vibrant weekly newspaper that covers the rich and powerful of Manhattan." he quotes Sicha as saying:

The word blogosphere has no meaning. There is no sphere; these people aren’t connected; they don’t have anything to do with each other.

Butterworth said, "The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things - the purview of old media - is arguably much more important." Sicha continues, according to Butterworth:

As for blogs taking over big media in the next five years? Fine, sure. But where are the beginnings of that? Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds. And they’re all excited about the global reach of blogs? Right, tell it to China.

I think Sicha exaggerates too much. Bloggers know that traditional media will always be around. However, it is being transformed as older newspaper readers die out and new media advocates--and some old ones-- adopt the best practices of bloggers to get new readers. Look at the number of newspaper editors letting their reporters blog, in an attempt to grab those who won't read their newspapers. They will be successful too if the blogs are written in conversational style, and reporters are allowed to say what they couldn't in the paper because of limited space. Which brings us to this: Blogging reporters make it possible for newspapers to use more of their news holes for advertising. As many blogs as I read, I still turn to newspapers for advertising when I want to purchase big ticket items.